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Claire Yaseed

Death, Birth, and the Sacred Role of the Traditional Midwife


After listening to the first episode of The Serpentine Path Podcast, one of my dear friends and mentors sent me a message asking if I had ever considered becoming a death doula. When the question was posed in the middle of the 8 minute long voice note, I laughed out loud and thought to myself, “Wait, have I somehow not already told her that I very seriously considered becoming a death doula in my early twenties…?”


Death and I have a long history.


I spent my thirteenth birthday in the hospital with intestines so inflamed that it was impossible to even digest my own saliva. For over a month, it had been impossible for me to eat anything and not even the strongest painkillers offered any relief from the white-hot, searing knives that were shredding my belly apart every few hours. Multiple specialists were working on my case for weeks. After countless tests that offered no answers, the doctors finally pulled my father aside and informed him that my illness was entirely psychosomatic. For days and days and days upon end, I screamed bloody murder and silently begged God to let me die. I knew that, if I wanted it enough, I could easily guide myself towards the inevitable portal of eternal rest and respite that is death. Miraculously, however, I knew that my work in this life was just beginning and I eventually made a full recovery with the help of extremely strong corticosteroids. The doctors never did find any cause for my illness.


At 18, a drunk driver blew through a stop sign and catapulted into the intersection that I was already crossing. I smashed into her passenger side door at full speed and saw the world go entirely white. In the 30 seconds that immediately followed the crash, I felt the most peace and quiet that I had ever known in my life. It was as if time had completely stopped. I felt as though my soul had moved out of my body and had engulfed all of the space around me, spreading itself out, far and wide, as if to say, “Ahhhh…finally. No longer encased in a body.” The peace of the moment came to an abrupt halt as the stress hormones finally conjured a bone chilling scream from my lungs. But in that brief window of time, I had seen that death was just on the other side of an invisible glass window and that I, in my heart of hearts, was not the least bit scared of it.


When I was 25, just a few months before I officially left New York City to commit to my path here in the jungle, I visited my local cemetery on Samhain (Halloween) to leave offerings for the spirits of the dead. After leaving said offerings, I attempted to continue walking around the perimeter of the cemetery when I saw the shadow of a gigantic, eight-foot-tall figure that was cloaked in a hooded black shroud. As it slowly turned towards me, I watched as it’s face and body shape-shifted and morphed from skin to bone to muscle to sinew to skeleton and back again. Finally, in the moment that it had fully turned to look me in the eyes, I knew that this otherworldly being was sending me an extremely clear message: the veil between the worlds is not one to play around in and the dead are not to be played with. With my deepest respect and humility, I asked for forgiveness for overstepping the boundaries and then ran home in the opposite direction, terrified of this guardian of death but also immensely grateful for the lesson that it had taught me.


Over the years, I have become increasingly fascinated by and comfortable with death. Throughout my late teens and early twenties, I devoured any information that I could find about death: near death experiences, palliative care and hospice, dying rituals from diverse cultures, and, eventually, direct communication with my own ancestors who have passed on to the other side. However, my most important teachings about death came from my experience of losing all four of my elders in the span of eight months. One by one, I watched as my blood and spiritual grandparents all transitioned to the other side.


In accompanying my elders in their dying processes—in person, in prayer, in dreams, in conversations, in songs, in visions, in stories—death inevitably became my friend. All of my fear, pain, and sadness was equally balanced by the gratitude, humility, and joy that I felt about this portal of deep learning that had been opened for me.


Because the inescapable truth is this: everyone dies, everything dies, and death is the only true guarantee that we have in this life.


In our modern culture, we are almost entirely severed from the most basic and most inevitable reality of the birth/death/rebirth cycle. Very few of us grow and harvest our own fruits and vegetables. Very few of us raise and kill the animals whose meat we eat. Very few of us live in multi-generational homes where we accompany our dying grandparents through their illnesses and/or dying processes. Very few of us have the time or ability to truly experience the changing of the seasons as we spend most of our days and nights indoors with our eyes glued to our screens. We barely notice how the leaves change color around us and then, inevitably, fall. We have no idea which fruits and vegetables are actually in season. We have no concept of what it means to watch the life force energy slowly fade out of an animal that we just killed with our own two hands. Death is an entirely foreign concept to us which is why we are so profoundly terrified of it.


I’m not going to pretend to actually know anything about death because the truth of the matter is that it’s quite literally impossible to say, for sure, what is on the other side of this current lived “reality”. I have seen and experienced many things about death in visions and in ceremonies. I have connected deeply and communicated extensively with many, many dead ancestors. I have watched many living beings die in front of me. And yet, death is still, and always will be, the greatest mystery of all. This is death’s greatest teaching: no matter how wise we may become in this life, we are never wiser than death, itself. What a humbling truth that is.


In my response to my friend/mentor’s question of whether I had ever considered death doula work, I shared that, more than anything, I see myself walking the path of a traditional midwife. Nowadays, we hear the term “midwife” and think of someone who attends births but the original role of the midwife was that of the wise woman who attended to all of life’s sacred initiations and rites of passages from womb to tomb. As someone who has spent the last decade considering whether I want to go into birth work or death work and feeling as though they were somehow competing for my attention, I now understand, deep in my bones, that my desire to accompany both deaths and births is what has actually been calling me to the path of midwifery all along. I still have no idea if I will ever be a birth worker in the modern definition of someone who attends in-person births. I am still playing around with possibilities of postpartum care work, pre and peri-natal psychology, birth trauma healing, childbirth and childcare education, and a plethora of other options that all fall under the umbrella of Matresence (i.e. a woman’s childbearing years). I walk this path very slowly and very patiently with the knowing that my own future experiences of pregnancy, labor, birth, and mothering will be the key that unlocks all that I am meant to be offering in the realm of “birth work”. There is much time for this chapter of my life to unfold and I am truly in no rush.


However, I do know in my heart that the role of midwife spans so far beyond the realm of birth and that I am already walking the midwife’s path in all of the work that I have done with death. The midwife is the one who guides young women through the death of their girlhood as they enter into their bleeding years. She is the one who offers young girls the education and care in this tender grieving and rebirth into their true power as a bleeding woman. The midwife is the one who teaches the curious teenagers about the sacredness of shared sexuality and the weight of what it means to open your body and your soul to another person. She is the one who explains what it means to allow one’s singularity to die in order to be rebirthed through the act of safe, consensual, loving, respectful sexual union with another so that one may become two which, then, may potentially become three or more, should a family emerge from this sacred coupling. The midwife is the one who accompanies the elder women through their transitions out of their bleeding chapter. She is the one who honors the death of their mothering years and initiates them into their community role as the village grandmother and wise woman. The midwife is the one who sings the dying into their deaths. She is the one who can call upon the strength of all of the ancestors and ask them to illuminate the path so that the dying loved one knows that they are not alone in their journey.


The midwife is the guardian of birth and death, creation and destruction, expansion and collapse. She carries the medicine of fertility in one hand and the medicine of inevitability in the other. She witnesses a baby’s first breath in one moment and then turns around and witnesses the dying breath of an elder in the next. Her path is ever-unfolding, spiraling in on itself, echoing and reflecting the unending cycle of birth/death/rebirth that we are all incapable of escaping from. What magic the midwife carries! What medicine she walks with! What humility, what grace, what sacredness she weaves with her hands, her songs, her stories, her eyes, her prayers, her laughter, her tears. What power her presence holds.


And so, no, I am not a certified/licensed death worker, I am not a certified/licensed birth worker, and I have no idea whether I will ever do any form of Westernized licensing/certification in order to accompany either of these initiatory portals. Like all things that I have learned and taught myself throughout my life, I believe that true medicine comes from the depth and weight of our own lived experiences. Therefore, above all the training and certifications and licensing and degrees, I see the midwife as one who devotes her life to the study of birth, death, and all of life’s sacred initiations from womb to tomb. For it is her devotion to the sacredness of all of life’s rites of passage that makes her a midwife, nothing else.


So in this can also say: Yes, I am already a birth and death companion, witness, and attendant because my entire life revolves around understanding, honoring, and being in right relationship with the birth/death/rebirth cycle. My entire life is devoted to unlearning all of the distortion and disconnection that colors our modern experiences of birthing and dying. My entire life is a process of healing and reclaiming the right to birth and die in peace and in power. In this, I already know myself to be walking the sacred path of a traditional midwife. Only time will tell how it all unfolds but I know that the Great Mystery of the birth/death/rebirth cycle will midwife me through it all.



ART CREDIT:

Syamarani dasi

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