Become A Vessel
Tracings of grief and early motherhood in the pandemic
“What is grief if not love persevering?”
-Vision, in WandaVision
Preface
January 13, 2024
Dear readers,
I am sharing this essay, which has been written in bits and pieces since my mother’s passing, in honor of the third anniversary of her death, January 16th. The grief I have experienced in my mother’s passing is an expression and extension of the infinite love she expressed in her lifetime and beyond, and our love for her, all of which I am immensely grateful. This is a tracing of my experience, and everyone who knew and loved her would have a different experience and tracing to share. May you see some of yourself in here.
With love and care,
Stephanie
“Become a vessel.”
These were the words a friend and mentor told me when I was getting ready to ordain that summer, as a laymember of the Order of Interbeing in the Plum Village tradition. I had probably asked his advice on how to prepare for the ceremony. Become a vessel for the trainings. Empty yourself so that you may receive, so that you may carry. Empty yourself for the transmission, make space for the trainings to fill you, to be a conduit for these trainings passed down to us from the Buddha through our teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. Be a vessel for the trainings so that you may live them fully. His words stayed with me.
The transmission ceremony for the 14 mindfulness trainings is a powerful ritual performed in community, where you are witnessed and supported as you commit to practice the trainings. I received the transmission at Deer Park monastery in September 2017, in community and in witness with beloved friends and family, including my parents. As part of the ceremony, you are given the dharma name. I received the name True Earth Dwelling.
It was after the ceremony, later that day, that I realized I might be a vessel of another kind entirely. I realized my cycle was due that day, and it hadn’t arrived, and it occurred to me that, quite possibly, I was pregnant.
I was pregnant.
I was a vessel.
A vessel for the trainings, and for the being who we would later call Daphne.
I loved being a vessel for her, I really did. I loved being pregnant. I loved taking care of myself with good food and yoga and walks and meditation and acupuncture and massage and reiki, knowing I was also caring for her. At the end of my pregnancy when she was two weeks late, we joked that she was too cozy in there to come out. With all that bodywork and energy work, why would she want to leave this safe, peaceful vessel, her home?
Before I became a mother, my cup - or let’s call it a pot - was full. I was resting on the counter, or maybe in some cool earth. I knew how to fill my own cup, and I did so diligently. My weekly sangha gatherings, in particular, were a practice that filled my cup, in addition to daily meditation, walking, yoga, and bike riding. I was able to keep my cup full. I went on mindfulness retreats a few times a year which added so much to my cup. My cup was so full, in fact, that I walked around spilling it generously wherever I went. I had so much to give. I gave and I gave and I gave, and I diligently refilled, so that I was never (or rarely) empty, so that I could give from a place of overflow.
When I became a mother, it felt like the pot was moved to the stove. I still did my practices, but had less time and regularity due to the rhythms of the baby and challenges of often solo parenting. Practiced shifted, and I found ways to adapt it to this new life. I was able to do enough to keep my pot at least half-full. Full enough.
In March 2020 when the pandemic hit, it was as if someone turned the heat up on high on the pot on the stove. No time or space or means to take care of oneself. No access to childcare, safely. The stress of trying to keep your family healthy and safe, especially in the early days when so little was known about how COVID spread. The most basic things, like getting groceries, became major stressors for all of us. The water was boiling, dangerously low.
And then my mother died from complications from Type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes, one year into the pandemic. A year of little to no childcare, little to no support, a year of fear and isolation. The water had been boiling for so long. Then it is was though the heat had been turned up on high, the water left to completely evaporate. Every act of “self-care” felt like water being thrown into a burnt pot. It evaporated on contact. There was no way to fill the pot. The pot was charred. Burnt.
The pot needs to be taken off the stove.
The heat needs to be turned off.
Water needs to be added.
And it needs to rest.
It so, so deeply needs to rest, to return to the cool earth to dwell.
Grief
First the grief was a burnt, charred pot. Then the grief felt like a lead coat, the kind you wear when you are getting an x-ray, but over my whole body. Everything felt so heavy, leaden. I cut my long hair because it was the one thing I could lighten, the only heaviness I could control.
Then the grief felt like a lead disc around my heart, then a ring of fire - less encompassing, more swirling, more movement. Then it felt like a wave. It came in wave after wave after wave - my birthday, Mother’s Day, my daughter’s birthday - each new wave crashing into me and flowing over, through and around me. Until finally, around June, I had the feeling of having just been pummeled and upside down, crashing into the ocean floor, the wave spitting me out on the shore. I was sitting on the shore, disheveled but grounded, looking back at the ocean asking, “WTF was that?! What just happened??”
Her death is the cleave of an ax mark on the timeline of my life, a distinct before and after. There are other before and afters, but none of them feel like an ax mark, a rift, a dramatic, harsh marking. The pandemic, too, is a collective ax mark. Before and after. Two giant ax marks, on top of each other, deepening the groove of before and after.
Her death reverberates through time, echoing throughout the pandemic. I can now only look at the Before Times, or even the first year of the pandemic, through the lens of her loss: the time we didn’t get to spend together, the daily FaceTime calls to help break up our day at home, me and my toddler. The trips we didn’t take. The holidays we didn’t spend. When I look at pictures taken before January 1, 2021, my first thought is always, “She was still here.” I look at a picture of my daughter from December 31, 2020, and think, “She was still alive that day.” Our world hadn’t changed yet.
It was a different world.
That last Thanksgiving, November 2020, my parents took the risk to come see us. It felt so incredibly risky at the time, and I seriously worried that we’d all literally kill each other. I worried when my mom kissed my daughter, which she couldn’t help but do. Toddlers carry a lot of germs, and I worried so much.
It ended up being the last time we saw each other.
My mom fell asleep on the last night of that most awful year, 2020, and never woke up. Its final brutal act was to take her from us. There is something so painfully poetic about this. She fell asleep on New Year’s Eve, and didn’t wake up on New Year’s Day, and spent 16 days in that in between space before she finally breathed her last breath.
Will I ever feel light again?
Will I ever feel bright again?
I trust that I will, but there is a heaviness now that I wonder if I will always carry.
Gifts Ungiven
The metal water bottle with love and peace doves on it was the last thing she never gave me.
When we arrived on January 2nd, I went to our room and found a pile of gifts she was clearly assembling for a package for me and Daphne: a bracelet and water bottle and headband; an outfit and book and toy. She was always sending packages. Gift giving was her love language, and she was good at it, and she was generous. Extremely generous.
She sent Daphne a package at least once a week via UPS. When the truck would pull up, Daphne would yell “Gaga!” (her name for my mom). Now when the truck passes by, every day, I am reminded. Reminded that there will be no more packages from Gaga.
In the days leading up to and after her death, we kept finding more and more gifts. Gifts ungiven. Gifts bought with someone in mind, gifts bought with no one in mind, just to have gifts on hand in case she needed a gift.
When we arrived on January 2nd, the New Year’s party favors she had taken to the bar where she had spent the afternoon were strewn on the couch. Under the party favors was the book I had sent her for Christmas which she had started to read. The table was set for the New Year’s Day dinner she had planned with friends. In the fridge were the ingredients to cook ham and sauerkraut, a New Year’s Day family tradition stemming from the German side of our heritage.
Gifts ungiven, books unread, meals left unshared.
Insurrection
The day of the insurrection we were preoccupied with the ICU. It was a Wednesday, and it was just starting to seem like she was plateauing. There had been hope that she’d wake up, and tiny glimmers of wakefulness, which seemed to fade or be wishful thinking after day after day of her not responding.
We followed our usual routine: wake up at 5 to call the night nurse; she’d report no change; we’d walk the dog and wait until we could call again late morning, around 11, after they’d done their rounds. We’d Zoom with her then or a little later, when a nurse had time to set up the tablet on her bed tray. They’d get us logged in and then prop the tablet in front of her closed eyes. We’d sing to her and tell her we loved her as we watched her squirm, eyes closed, intubated, writhing, or sometimes not much moving at all. We’d wonder if the movements were her response to us or just her body doing its thing, unwinding life. When still, the stillness was troubling.
The pandemic permeated every part of the process. We couldn’t visit because of COVID. Hospitals were stretched way beyond capacity, gurneys in the hallways, and no visitors were allowed unless end-of-life decisions were being made. I wonder what difference, if any, it would have made if we could have been there. If we could have placed Daphne on her lap, might she have woken up? If we had been able to be in the room, might we have been able to call her back? But these thoughts are pointless, because that is not in fact what happened. There is no point in thinking them.
That Wednesday, January 6th, in the background hummed the insurrection. The whole nation focused on the capitol, while we were glued to the ICU Zoom and no news. We never fully tuned into it, just had the TV on at a few points, simultaneously stunned and not surprised at all by what was happening. If anything, we were stunned it hadn’t happened sooner. But it was bizarre to have it happening while our attention was so engrossed in something else, clearly the more important thing for us, shaking our familial world as the nation and world shook otherwise.
A few days later, they invited us to visit her in the hospital.
She was extubated on a new moon, January 13, 2021. She was moved to hospice, where we could be with her, masked and two at a time in the room. She passed on January 16, 2021, in the middle of the night. Gathered around her body, we recited prayers and sang her home.
Battery
That spring, when we returned home, I left my daughter to spend a night alone in a hotel.
“So glad you had a chance to recharge your battery,” my cousin texted me.
My battery almost needed to be replaced, it was so drained.
A few weeks before, I had dreamed that my car wouldn’t start, so it was no surprise when I went out one day and it didn’t. I called roadside assistance, having realized that I had three days left on the warranty and, rather than just trying to jump it, I wanted to have someone who knew a little something look at it so if there was something more seriously wrong, I might get it covered.
The man who came to jump the car used two of his machines and couldn’t get it to start. Eventually he did.
“So should I just leave it running for twenty minutes or so?” I asked.
“Leave it running and drive yourself to wherever you’re going to get a new battery,” he said. This battery was beyond dead - had nothing left in it. Nothing left to charge, nothing left to give.
Oh, battery, how I could relate.
This is what being a mother in the pandemic losing her mother felt like, what I tried to succinctly describe as pandemic winter solo parenting while grieving. Each one of those things are hard alone and together they were far too much. My battery was beyond charging. It could not be jumped. It was empty beyond replenishment. Any efforts at self-care felt like that last jump - not sustainable without serious intervention.
And that’s what my night away felt like. Not just recharging the battery, getting a new one.
Past lives
Before I became a mother, I lived many lives, and spent a lot of time in solitude. I love community, I love being with friends, I love people, and I love being alone. My battery gets charged alone in a way that it cannot get charged otherwise. I need time alone as much as I need sleep and good food and exercise and rest. I need it to survive. I need it to be me, and I need it for how I want to live my life. To fill my cup.
I wonder about the lives my mother lived before she was my mother.
Shortly after my mom’s birthday during the first year after she passed, I received some photos from one of my mom’s best friends, her sorority sister from college. She sent pictures of my mom from around that time.
I’ve seen pictures of my mom from then, but maybe not lately, maybe not since I’ve been a mom, and I realized my mom had this whole life before she was Mom that I never really knew. She was a babe, a total fox, really. Long blonde hair, beautiful body, great smile. She looks so happy in these pictures. In one she is dressed up (or not wearing much at all, really) as Goldie Hawn from Laugh In, a bikini and body paint. You could see from even then, that was her role, it was the thread running through her life - to make people laugh, to be the life of the party, fun, colorful, vibrant, head tipped back, laughing.
There was a whole life of hers that I didn’t know. I didn’t know Jill Poole, the sorority sister, the teacher-in-training. I only knew Mom, my mom, Jill Poole Knox. And of course Jill Poole was in Mom, but she also wasn’t. I didn’t know her fully.
The pictures make me wonder. What was she like? She looks so vibrant, someone you’d want to be around. Cute. Fun. Beautiful. Funny.
What will Daphne think of me? Will she someday find pictures of me, drunk and scantily clad in a costume and in another country, and wonder who that person was before she became her mom?
One of the struggles of motherhood is reconciling who you were with who you are becoming, with remembering what you used to love and need before you became a mother, what you desired, and figuring out what you need and desire now. Motherhood combined with the pandemic combined with deep grief shattered all of this, all remembering of basic needs or desires or any possibility to meet them.
But slowly, I am remembering, picking up the pieces and finding new ones.
Present moment
December 31, 2023
My cup is overflowing for the first time since 2018. My breaths are deeper, like I have more space internally to take in air. I have just spent three nights on a retreat alone, my first solo retreat since Daphne was born. I remember this feeling, which I used to feel every week when I left my meditation group. I would go out into the world, to my work and relationships, arrive on Sunday and would leave feeling full. Overflowing. Restored. Abundant.
In this past year or so, I haven’t been the burnt pot. I’ve felt more like a water feature with water cycling through. Occasionally getting a little low on energy, never overflowing, but never drying out either. More or less sustainable. Sort of.
Overflowing is another thing. It is abundance that needs to be shared. It is feeling ready to take care of others’ needs from a place of desire rather than obligation. Of wanting to give from a place of overflow, rather than having to regardless of the state of supply.
Now I know what I need to do. I know how I want to live.
I remember, I remember, I remember.
It is the third anniversary. Three years ago, she celebrated. She went to sleep in 2020, the hardest year, and never woke up to see 2021, the even harder year.
This is why people stay up until midnight, isn’t it? To make sure they see the new year. Which of course seems silly. Ridiculous. Of course you’re going to see it. But some people don’t. She didn’t. She fell asleep before midnight. She never saw it.
It’s December 31, 2023. It’s now normal not to have her there. I was never a huge New Year’s Eve fan, perhaps needless to say, now less so. The past two years, I’ve booked travel on that day, when the airports are less crowded and fares are cheaper and I have an excuse to not make merry. She wouldn’t want our remembrances to be somber occasions, though. She was the life of the party, and always looked for a reason to have a party.
Love and joy and grief inter-are. They’re not separate, and they exist together. And I do believe our deep grief, in remaking us, carves us out for a deeper joy, that without knowing grief, we couldn’t know joy so fully.
I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow, the anniversary of her not waking, the ax mark of before/after, or January 16th, the anniversary of her passing. But as I close this year, I'm not the burnt pot. I’m not wearing the lead coat. The lead disc and ring of fire appear from time to time, but aren’t omnipresent. They’re more like antennae now, that seemingly randomly get triggered or pick up on personal or collective grief. I am more sensitive to it, and my heart may always be heavier, but it can be heavy and full at the same time.
I’m a golden jeweled chalice, wide and glistening and full. I’m overflowing again, returning to my life to spill generously.