A Familiar Grief
How do mothers bear the death of their children multiple times?
How do mothers bear the death of their children multiple times?
I am a Somali-American and a mother. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on the impact of the war in Ukraine on food insecurity worldwide.
It featured mothers in Somalia burying some children while hanging onto other children themselves on the brink of death.
I know a lot about how those of us who live in the West deal with death, grief, and trauma.
Here in America, we have terms, conceptual models, and frameworks to talk about the unimaginable grief that leaves you on the floor, gasping in pain associated with dead and dying children.
For many mothers worldwide, the grief of a dead or dying child is constant, relentless, and common.
It begins when you are young and many of your siblings, cousins, and friends die.
And it continues as the young women in your life begin to die during pregnancy and childbirth.
And it doesn’t stop when you are a mom, and you have miscarriages, stillbirths, and children who keep dying before they reach five years of age.
How do they bear it?
How do they integrate grief and pain into their lives?
How are they still standing, mothering, caretaking, foraging, cooking, cleaning, and striving to live?
Tens of thousands of mothers at any given moment are sitting near the grave of a just buried child while holding another child themselves close to death.
What is grief when it is everywhere and present all of the time?
What is grief when you hold the seeds of despair in your belly and arms as you look at pieces of your heart already in the ground?
Khullani- What a deep, moving, and important piece. The questions you pose. The look into the depth of grief. The confrontation with the inner self. All of it is a testament of the richness of your Somali-American heritage. Thank you for sharing.