A ritual I never asked for
During the pandemic, I would reach out to my friend Mike who had chosen to remain in Uganda where he was channeling resources and agency towards refugees. One day we were chatting about the difficulties of dating in a locked down world. I had recently left a challenging relationship and was living with my Dad in the thousand-person town that I grew up in. Mike shared how he desired more than anything to have a family, and how hard that may be as he had primarily lived in refugee camps over the last seven years. I felt the spark of possibility between us. Soon after that, we started dating and quickly fell in love. Three years into our relationship, we made the biggest commitment that any two people can make: we decided to have a baby.
We made love under the summer solstice full moon on the polynesian atoll of Fakarava during the time of the largest grouper fish spawning in the world. A month later, we conceived at Burning Man, on the day of the only Tuesday Temple burn in history, thanks to the headline-making rain and mud that brought the festival to a halt. Our son Cozmo’s epic life story had begun.
Four months later, atop a mountain peak in Antarctica, with Paradise Bay shimmering below us as humpback whales spouted, Mike asked me to be his wife. He opened a heart shaped wooden box and placed my great grandmother’s ring onto my finger. We called the trip our “baby moon”. After seven nights on a ship navigating icebergs around Antarctica, we hiked in Patagonia with beloved friends, my pregnant belly getting more pronounced by the day.
My relationship with my future child was growing alongside my belly. I began to listen to all the things that this baby was asking of me. I saw the need to restructure my life, to make space for becoming the mother I was destined to be. Over the last decade, I had lived a life that was consumed by my passion for my work. I strongly identified with my role inside of a world-changing non-profit that had been pioneering research into psychedelic assisted therapies for nearly forty years. It was time to let it all go. The last day at my job was Dec, 29, 2023. As the year turned, my transformation was underway. I was no longer a workaholic Maiden. I had a new identity. It was, “Mother.”
One morning, as I lay in bed, I felt Cozmo flutter inside of me for the first time. I heard a tiny voice that said, “Hi Mom!” A few days later, I made my first public post to social media in months. I announced three things: that I was pregnant, engaged, and leaving my longtime job. I received hundreds of messages of support from every corner of my world. I felt every aspect of my life shifting. I could feel the universe nudging me along in deep alignment with the choices I was making. I was in constant awe of the lifeform unfurling inside of me.
When we first announced my pregnancy to a room full of friends at a hotel party back in November, I was approached by some girlfriends who offered a vision to me. They wanted one of the first sounds that our baby heard to be a chorus of voices singing to him. The song we all landed on was Wild Sweet by Starling Arrow. Go my wild sweet, here for you as you for me. Go my wild sweet, here for you as me. I started to sing this song to the baby throughout my pregnancy.
Mike and I showed up to the twenty week scan feeling high on life. Having made it through a difficult first trimester, I was energized and enlivened by how great I felt during the second trimester. Except for a bump on my skin I had gotten checked out, my body felt amazing. I had never felt more grateful to be alive.
The scan took twice as much time as the last one. The technician kept retracing one spot on my belly with the wand. We thought nothing of it. Mike kept me entertained by naming all the body parts as they emerged on the screen. After a while, he dozed off in the chair next to me. The technician printed out photos, including one of our baby giving us a thumbs up. As we waited for the doctor, Mike wrote a message to send to our families alongside this image.
“Ten fingers, ten toes, everything looks great, Mom feels amazing!”
The doctor entered the room and went straight to business. The first question she asked us was if we had time to stay there for another hour. My stomach sank. Why would we need to stay?
She said, “There is a serious problem with your baby.”
The words came tumbling out and bounced around the room. My mind immediately spiraled to the worst case scenario. I felt a crushing pressure. Panic consumed me and I couldn’t move. As she began explaining things, I could hear Mike gripping the sands of hope in his hand. Mike said, “These are all things that we can handle, right?” He was hearing that there might be a way to save the baby. All I heard was, “This is over.”
I quickly realized that a protocol for parents receiving devastating news inside of the exam room had been activated. Other parents stared at us as we were shuffled into another office. The terror was written all over us. An iPad on a stand was wheeled into the room. An on-call doctor soberly peered at us through the screen. As she began to explain his birth defect to us, I started to fade in and out of the room. Her voice became distant and her words came in incomprehensible slow motion. My memory grayed out. I could only hear the high pitched internal scream echoing throughout my mind. NO! Not us. This can’t be happening. My thoughts began to spiral. What did I do to cause this? Was it all the travel, the excessive hiking? I had missed taking my prenatal vitamins on some days.
Lately, I had been feeling completely attuned to my physical form. Each day, I would feel waves of bliss as the baby moved. There was no indication that something was wrong. How could my body betray me so completely?
The specialist was describing a surgical intervention that could save our baby’s life. I saw the wheels in Mike’s head spinning as he considered this chance of survival. But at what cost? How many surgeries and transplants? What would his life expectancy be? And the quality of his life? How much pain would he have to endure?
We spent the next six days trying to answer these questions. We attended appointments with specialists at UCSF and learned everything we could about the condition of our baby. In between appointments I was immobilized by despair. I sat in the same spot on my couch for days upon days, Mike lovingly tending to my every whim, delivering food on trays and cuddling up next to me. Seeing or speaking to friends or family was simply out of the question. What would I tell them? We still didn’t know for sure what the outcome of this would be.
sculpture by UCSF, in between appointments, in between worlds
On the third night, we went to a small dinner party that a close friend was hosting. The topic gradually turned to the human inside of me. Had we thought about names? Will there be a baby shower? A baby blessing? Was I getting enough Iron and B vitamins? I answered every question as if everything was normal. I forced myself to laugh. That was the last time I would attempt to see people socially for several weeks.
During those long days and nights on that couch, Mike and I grappled with what it could mean to give birth to a very sick baby. We discussed what our lives would look like and wondered out loud if we could handle it. Eventually, we both landed in the same place. We decided that we would take on a lifetime of pain so that Cozmo would not have to. We realized that this was our first serious parenting decision. We wept at our clarity. Later that day, Mike felt him kicking for the first time.
The next day we had our final appointment. We waited in a private waiting room at UCSF. We were then taken to a small office with a desk and three chairs. Our doctor entered in a crisp white lab coat. She was about our age. She reviewed every bit of information that we had accumulated and provided us the finality we were praying for. Our baby did not qualify to receive the surgical intervention that might have saved his life. Both his kidneys had already failed and ceased to produce urine. He would be unable to develop a cascade of internal organs and systems, and was very unlikely to survive to full term. This information affirmed our choice. Our precious baby boy, who we loved so intimately, and who our whole future was oriented around, was not going to live. “That’s it,” I whispered as Mike took my hand. We would end this pregnancy.
We were given another decision to make: (1) Stay pregnant and allow his life to take its course, eventually end, and manage giving birth to a dead fetus (2) Induce labor and give birth to him or (3) A surgical procedure called a Dilation and Evacuation (D&E), where I would be put under general anesthesia and he would be removed from my uterus.
Our doctor reassured us that this condition is almost never caused by genetics, that nothing in my lifestyle choices could have caused this, that it was simply a rare unexplainable birth defect that just happens. She told me whatever choice we made, my body would need some time to heal.
My care team at the UCSF Fetal Intervention Center was all women. They gave me the best experience I have ever had inside of any healthcare system. They answered the phone every time I called, addressing me by name, never placing me on hold. They were crystal clear in every expectation they set for me. They did research and set up all my appointments for my various scans and consultations. Their care was palpable. Time and again, they stated that this was not our fault. Ending my pregnancy now was a compassionate thing to do for our baby. After receiving this final blow, a nurse who I had spoken to several times came to our door. She let me know that she too lost a baby at this late stage. Twenty-two weeks. Then she said she knew me from my work. She quietly indicated that certain therapies had been extremely supportive for her own healing around late-stage pregnancy loss. She held both my hands and looked me in the eye and thanked me.
Here in this raw moment, she was offering recognition to me. I felt alive in this witnessing, aware that I was not alone.
Mike walked me to the parking lot. My phone rang. I picked it up, thinking it was one of the many doctors I had been in touch with all week. “Your biopsy tested positive for basal cell carcinoma, a very benign form of skin cancer, you have three treatments to choose from, this needs to be taken care of right away”. I burst out laughing. I stopped being able to process what she was saying. I handed the phone to Mike telling him, “apparently I have cancer.” Shockwaves upon shockwaves. We drove home over the Bay Bridge in silence. The sun was brightly shining. I quietly wept the entire way.
I got home, took off my ill-fitting clothes, put on a purple fuzzy robe and plopped down in my corner of the couch, now indented by the shape of my body. I stared at the wall across from me.
I began to pick through a stack of literature on my treatment choices. I started to think about the fact that in twenty one states, I would have no option but to let nature run its course, to carry him until he died inside of me and even beyond that point, then eventually birth a corpse. Doing this could put my own health at extreme risk. It would further delay the chance for us to start trying again. I shuddered at this thought. How incredibly barbaric. Unjust. Cruel. I sat with the fact that these policies assume that mothers like me do not want their babies. In reality, we who are forced to make impossible decisions and walk through this nightmare want nothing more than to have our babies. They call us evil, ungodly, selfish. There they stand, between us and our own bodies, our own offspring, our very agency. Our own lives. These thoughts boiled inside of me, enraging me.
Mike came over and sat with me. He said, “I will support whatever you decide.” I considered the option of naturally birthing my son. I played out the whole scenario in my mind's eye. It would be difficult and painful. It would be risky. Yet we would be able to meet him, and if by some miracle he was still alive, to look him in the eyes, to hold him before he died. This image snapped shut. No. This was not the first birthing experience I wanted to have. I did not have to choose the hardest possible way. This whole situation was traumatizing enough without the imprints of meeting my baby that would never get to live.
We scheduled the D&E procedure. It would happen in six days.
It was time to finish telling our families what was going on. I called my sister, who had already been filled in, and asked her if she would drive over to my dad’s house. I knew he couldn’t be alone when he received this news. Once she got there, I FaceTimed them. My palms were sweating. My dad wanted us to call our baby Max. As always, when he picked up the phone, he joyfully said, “How’s Max?”
My face twisted in pain. All I managed to say was, “Something bad has happened.” He immediately knew our son was lost. My dad fell into a fit of sorrow. Grief poured out of him in loud sobs. My sister held him and we all joined in his chorus of pain. I have never cried so hard. My dad had been very sick. He once told me, “Meeting your baby is my reason to stay alive.”
When we hung up, alone in our room, feeling more empty than ever, Mike and I clutched each other, knowing that this horror was happening not only to us. We now had to wait for six more days.
Now what? What was I supposed to do with myself for almost a whole week? I had already been rotting on this couch for days. Seeing people was out of the question. So few knew what was going on, and every time we broke the news it broke us. I could not continue to scroll through my phone. I had stopped responding to everyone. Nearly every day, I was getting a message from a loved one asking how I was feeling as an increasingly pregnant woman. So lovely. So deeply triggering. Every targeted ad was for new mothers. I spent half a day flagging these ads as “inappropriate” until finally my feeds were cleared of baby clothes, toys, and strollers. My legs were stiff from inaction. I had begun regularly eating pastries.
I noticed how frantically my mind was racing around. How tense my whole body felt. How totally consumed with anxiety, terror, and grief I was. I needed to change my state. Yet the things I did to regulate myself had been out of reach for months. Pregnant people are not supposed to take hot baths, long saunas, and bike rides. They are not supposed to smoke joints. These things had been medicine to me for years. Then it struck me. I was abstaining from them for the sake of a baby that would not live.
I considered Mother Marijuana’s reliable allyship throughout more than half of my life. I could pray with her. I could ask for her support during this extraordinary time. I could release myself into her arms and receive a warm little hug from the universe through her.
I asked Mike to bring me some weed and papers. I rolled a joint and we sat outside on the cushioned teak chairs on our deck beneath the loquat and redwood trees. I closed my eyes and asked, “How shall I be with myself during these next days?” I took two puffs. It was all I needed.
I sank into noticing my surroundings and the sensations of my body. I felt the dappled sunlight on my face and took in the laughter of children playing in the schoolyard nearby. I noticed how outrageously good it felt to be pregnant!
I felt the buzzy, rolling sensation made up of the electricity of two hearts beating inside one body.
It struck me then that Cozmo’s entire experience of existence would be inside of me. If I remained in a state of terror and grief, that was all that he would know. With lightning bolt clarity, my prayer was answered. His experience of life was up to me. If I could tap into the joyful sensations and pleasures that this earthly realm had to offer, he would feel it too. I could spend all the days we had left together “blissing out” my baby. Through me, Cozmo would know the unique, exquisite beauty of existing in the earthly realm. I determined to I would try.
The next day, I could not get out of bed. All I kept thinking was that my baby is going to die. I was sure it was somehow my fault. I had made up my mind to make Cozmo’s final days his best. Now joy was inaccessible.
My darkness filled my womb.
I noticed one beam of sunlight peering through the curtains. I stared at it as it caught the rising dust. I thought, oh right. It’s sunny out. This is a planet where sunlight exists. I brightened.
Since taking a death midwifery course at twenty three, I’d had the honor of being with death and dying in many forms. I had gathered tools over these years of walking with grief. Yet nothing prepared me for welcoming death inside of my body. I was in way over my head and the only way out would be through help. And I knew which kind of help I needed.
I began to call around to death doulas in my network. I was eventually pointed to Britt Eldridge, a birth midwife trained as a death doula who specialized in pregnancy loss. She came over and sat on my cozy couch just two days after Cozmo’s fate was sealed. She listened intently as I shared our story through tears. She gave me permission to be utterly broken. She shared stories of how mothers have memorialized their babies, reviewed the options we may have for receiving remains, and brought a custom blend of herbal tea in a brown bag labeled ‘“Grief’”.
I told her that I wanted to do a living funeral for my unborn baby. It did not make sense to me to wait until after the procedure to do a ceremony, in the same way that when a person knows they are dying, people wait until after they are gone to gather and celebrate their lives. I have always been partial to what is called a “living funeral”. I wanted our friends to spend time with our little baby before he left this earth. I wanted him to experience the touch of their love while he was still with us.
We chose the day before the procedure to host a ritual. It was a Sunday. Friends arrived early to help our housemates with setting up the space. We began laying an altar of candles and flowers in and around the fireplace in our bedroom. I repeatedly stated, “I don’t want to do this. What was I thinking?”
Guests began to arrive. We wrapped the picture of Cozmo’s sonogram around a vigil candle. My mind was racing. Did we have enough toilet paper? We placed sweetgrass, cedar, and sage on the altar. I noticed that the carpet needed vacuuming. A knitted giraffe rattle and a wooden toy airplane were placed next to a tiny pair of Moroccan slippers, all gifts for Cozmo. We’d asked them to bring food for after. Were there enough plates and forks?
My frenetic pin-balling around was interrupted and I was told to go get dressed. But what would I wear? Nothing fit anymore. I reached back into a deep drawer and found loose white clothes normally reserved for a plant medicine ceremony.
I stayed downstairs as friends gathered in the dining room, laying out snacks and herbal beverages. They were eventually invited to join us.
I lit copal in my great grandmother’s small cast iron cauldron. The smoke filled the stairwell leading down to our bedroom. Mike and I were seated in front of the altar. Each person came and greeted us with hugs. They placed letters, finger puppets, feathers, and stones they had brought onto the altar. They joined us in a seated circle.
Oh God, I thought. I’ve made fourteen of my friends with busy lives give us their Sunday afternoon. I asked them to be here. They would have to be monsters to say no. Did they come out of obligation? Guilt? Who was I to ask them for help? Yet something was clear to me: I needed their presence in witnessing this moment. The silence stretched on as I searched for what to say. “Has anyone here ever attended a living funeral for an unborn baby?” Everybody laughed. Of course they hadn’t. Who has? We welcomed the awkward, the uncomfortable, the strange. It was about to get weird. And everyone was game.
I sat with both hands on my belly, opening myself to the connection with my womb and the person it contained. He was still, quiet. Perhaps asleep. I couldn’t fully read him. I prayed that he would know that all of this was happening for him. After opening the ceremony, we invited those present to share if they felt called.
My friend Galen spoke. She was bawling. She shared how much she loved this baby. She had been even more excited than I was. Every time I saw her she would greet Baby first and then me. She would speak of all the things they would do together in the future. It wasn’t what she said, it was the tone of voice, the depth of emotion, the tears. When I told her I was pregnant, she signed up to be an active participant in our baby’s life. This loss was hers as much as it was mine.
As more friends shared, I realized I had not anticipated the degree of impact that this loss had on our friends and family. Some of my closest girlfriends do not intend to have children. I knew they felt invested in our baby, yet did not comprehend the extent of their commitment until we sat in that circle, cut wide open in the full writhing of grief. Before this, I would have described this friend group as close. As we shared our rawest pain, as they wept with us and held us, I sensed our connection deepen. I had never touched a place like this.
This loss was not just mine and Mike’s to hold, it was all of ours. The golden thread of their words wove us together, touching a new layer of intimacy between us.
My friend Erica read letters from all four grandparents. Through sobs, Mike read a letter he had written to our son, sharing the hopes and dreams he had for him.
“I so desperately wanted to meet you, to feel you, be in water with you, to take you surfing. You would have really loved California and this place we call Earth, it’s really spectacular and filled with so many adventures and wonderful beings...
...Your existence, as brief as it is, is real and significant. Farewell, my son, not born, but never unloved or forgotten. We say not goodbye, but thank you Cozmo.”
In all of our research, we only found one culture that had a ritual for babies that did not make it. Japanese Zen culture places volcanic stone “Jizu” dolls into their gardens to represent these souls. The monks invite the parents to place the doll while they chant. The parents typically knit a hat or make a little outfit for the doll. Mike acquired a Jizzu doll for us, and during the ceremony he wrapped it in orange cloth and placed it on our altar. I stroked my belly gently. Still, I could not get a sense for Cozmo. My baby boy. Now is the time to be awake.
Shana and Lauren, two housemates who were a huge part of my whole pregnancy journey, began to sing a song. When they hummed the first chord, I knew which song it was, and I began to cry. Go my wild sweet, here for you as you for me. Go my wild sweet, here for you as me. I placed my hands on my belly. I whispered, my wild sweet, they are singing this for you.
The ceremony had reached its final part. We had shredded ourselves. There was one thing left to do. The invitation to friends had said, “Join us to bliss baby Cozmo out.” A sly smile crossed my face. I said to the circle, “This may look a lot like blissing me out.” I wanted everyone in the room to have the chance to be with him, to touch and feel him, to fill him with the vibration of their voices and instruments, for him to receive the frequency of their love.
I crawled into the middle of the circle and laid down on the sheepskin rug. I was aware as I did of the swirling grief inside, the raw and edgy place, the sense I was totally not “okay.” I lay there before my friends and my beloved, more exposed than I had ever been. I closed my eyes and let go. I felt someone take my hand and begin massaging it. Now someone began to gently scratch my head. Now someone started to massage my feet. A tibetan singing bowl was placed on my chest and it rang out, sending vibrations through my whole body. The chimes came in, then the voices. Rolling waves of vocal intonation, with the strum of ukelele, the ding of a triangle. I felt soft hands land on my belly, cupping over the baby. The thought came to me, the hands around me are hands I trust. I could settle into this. There was no longer any need for holding on.
“Let go,” I whispered to myself. “Let go,” I whispered to my son. Mike stroked my face. “You are loved,” he said again and again. “You are loved.” In that moment, I felt ancient. There was nothing. All was light. This went on for an eternity. I felt a shifting in my belly. A moment later, Cozmo began to dance.
Laying there, I have never felt so beautiful, so luminous, so deeply cared for, so witnessed.
In the days and months that followed, I consistently returned to the balm that was harvested on this night. Marking this potent moment in these ways was a choice. The right choice.
This is what is possible when women have choice.
This story is dedicated to my father Dick Gillooly.
It was lovingly crafted with the exquisite support of David Alder and the Parables of Change writing course. My gratitude goes to David and my fellow course mates who helped me parse through so many parts of this story. My heart is overflowing.
