H A G-Wise 4: What is a life worth?
On mothering our children and the land.
It’s 4am on a Sunday morning. I have been awake for an hour, and I have enough experience of this now to know I can’t fight it. So here I sit in my dark-dappled kitchen, cup of fennel tea on my right, phone and Braiding Sweetgrass on my left. I light a candle; I have been lighting a lot of candles lately, a way, perhaps, of bringing some light into the darkness that is spreading across the planet, a vigil for hope. With that tender flame flickering, I am ready to spin a web of thoughts into some kind of coherence.
In my last post, Moving Between Worlds, I found myself in freefall, words I had not intended to write spilling onto the page. And so it is again. In the context of the wider world, there is escalating loss and death, and although it is far removed from me in terms of geography, as a mother and a human being, I still feel the weight and grief of it.
In recent weeks, death moved a little closer, creeping into the periphery of my family. Those deaths are not my story to tell, and all I can do is support those dear to me as they succumb to the inevitable flow of mourning and grief. It is painful to watch people you love suffer, knowing there is nothing you can do to ease it. Grief, I have learned, is a kind of suffering, and we feel grief for all kinds of reasons, not just the loss of loved ones.
Yesterday, my son left for work in the morning as normal. Five minutes later, his car skidded on a patch of mud, or water, on the narrow country lane where I regularly walk on my daily wanderings. He turned towards the hedge in an attempt to avoid the mother driving towards him with her two young children in the back. His tyre gouged into the embankment as the car came to a stop, resting precariously on just two wheels, and then, slowly, it toppled onto its roof.
He did not hit the car with the mother and the children in it. They did not have to manoeuvre to safety. My son is alive and well, if a little traumatised. When I saw the car later, resting partly on its roof, partly on its windscreen, I wondered how anyone in the front seat could have escaped unscathed.
That road is quiet, which is one of the reasons I like to walk there. It is narrow and hilly, the hedges rising from steep embankments on either side with no hard shoulder; if you meet a tractor, there are few passing places, all of which means not many drivers choose to travel that way. And yet there were a surprising number of witnesses to the accident who said my son was driving safely at a reasonable speed. One woman said he regularly passes her on the road and always drives safely and slowly. Young men have a reputation in Ireland for reckless driving, so although I trust my son, it was reassuring to hear this from the mouths of strangers.
It is not the first time that my son has confronted his own mortality. He was born with Hirschsprung’s Disease, a condition which required several surgeries and made him very sick as a baby and young child. I remember the shock when, at a follow up consultation some years after his recovery, one of his doctors said there was a time during his treatment when they had done all they could for him, and didn’t know if he would make it. During that awful first eighteen months of his life, when he and I had practically lived in the hospital, I had never considered the possibility that his doctors would fail to fix him. I had trusted and believed.
When I bought my car in the late summer of 2016, I never imagined it might, one day in the future, endanger my son’s life, and yet, at the same time, it also saved him. Its strong shell took the damage, keeping his soft human one unharmed. Once the shock subsided, I let the gratitude in, and it felt cleansing and joyful.
I feel for all the mothers in the Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, and in all the other parts of the world where there is conflict; they are all human, doing their best to keep their children alive, just like you and me. I’m sure all they want is peace for their children to grow up in safely, just like the peace in which I am privileged to rear mine.
Remember to hold your loved ones close and tell them, or show them, every day how much you love them. Because you can’t predict the unexpected.
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