I've had Mamiko Suzuki's "Chuva" on repeat all day. I discovered this sweet song through the cozy anime series, With You and the Rain.
My mother was part of my soul. With her death, my soul has been torn from me. There is no one to hold me. No one to make it better. It cannot be made better. It can only be endured.
I want to stop people and say: Don't you know how precious she was? Don't you understand what I've lost? Can't you feel that something is missing in the world now?
I'm not religious, but I pray that I survive this catastrophe. I need such tenderness and love, and there is none to be found. Few people genuinely care about me. All my friends live far away. I've never known loneliness and emptiness like this. The world is a cold void.
Goddess Remembered (Donna Read, 1989)
"My journey is guided at every point by the Goddess. Present in the rocks that undergird life, in the darkness where life is conceived and transformed, in the air and the ever-changing waters, the Goddess is the love that supports embodied and relational being."
— Carol P. Christ, Odyssey With the Goddess
"As my mother was dying, I had an absolutely clear sense that she was going 'to love.' Not necessarily to Goddess or God, not necessarily to Mom and Dad, but simply 'to love.' I told Mom several times not to be afraid because she was going 'to love.'"
— Carol P. Christ, Odyssey With the Goddess
"When my mother passed from this life she was surrounded by a great matrix of love. As she died, I began to understand that I too am surrounded by love and always have been. This knowledge is a great mystery."
— Carol P. Christ, Odyssey With the Goddess
Donna Read's documentary, Goddess Remembered, brought about a great shift in consciousness for me when I first watched it a few years ago. I was in the depths of the Underworld, as my mother's health declined and I became her caregiver from 2020 until her death in 2025. In that dark night of the soul, I found the Goddess—and She saved me.
I am interested in the Goddess as symbol, archetype, and myth. As reparative image. As antidote to patriarchy. As life force. As erotic connection. As sacred self-love. As creatrix. As intuition. As guide. She is not literal, and I am well-aware that we do not actually know what our pre-historic ancestors felt about the thousands of female figurines they carved. That matters less to me than what I feel inside my body when I see the figurines. I even have reproductions of them on my altar.
It's often seen as embarrassing to say you're spiritual, to use words like holy and sacred. I scoffed at it myself from my teens into my early 30s. Part of what made my father's death so devastating was the godlessness of it. I had no comfortable belief in a heavenly afterlife. He was gone, buried in the ground. That's all I knew as a teenager. The horror of it was not balanced by anything nurturing or beautiful or life-affirming. The trauma annihilated me.
When I turned 30, a lifetime of buried pain started to surface. This pain was triggered by many things—my mother's health issues, a devastating experience of unrequited love, and the pandemic. All of it brought me to my knees. In many ways, it was a multi-year breakdown. I frantically searched for something to ground me, to give me meaning, to keep me connected to life.
I found the Goddess, which is to say I found myself. I found my strength, my sacredness, my beauty, my voice, my inner life force. Finding those things saved me. And going through the painful process of disintegration forced me to reconstruct myself as a stronger, wiser, and deeper woman. Without that breakdown and restoration, I could not have cared for my mother in her final weeks as she died from cancer. I could not have sat by her side as she took her last breath.
Like Carol P. Christ, I felt the "great matrix of love" in that room with my mother. She once told me she would love me until her last breath, and she kept her word. She was unconscious from liquid morphine, but I believe in my heart that she knew I was there in the room beside her. I believe she knew that it was safe to let go. I believe that it was my mission in this life to care for my mother, to protect her, to make sure she did not die alone and that she was surrounded by love as she left this world—and I completed that mission. If I do nothing else in this life, I did one thing right.
In the moment she left this world, I felt such a deep love. I cannot put it into words. Maybe she transferred all the love inside her to me. She was so strong, so kind, so good. Maybe what I felt was her spirit and her light filling the room. Her love created me. Her love saved me. It saves me still.