This was not an easy post to write. But it’s been a necessary one.
Take care of your heart as you read it, and know that I deeply appreciate you receiving this personal story that has shaped who I am and what I do today like no other.
“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead.”
—Arundhati Roy
On the Winter Solstice of 2022, I visited Delphi for the first time. At that point, my nephew had been in critical condition in the ICU for exactly two months following an operation no-one had prepared us it could have such an outcome.
I had dreamt of making a pilgrimage to this sacred land my whole life, but I could never have predicted the circumstances under which I would eventually do so. Throughout my time there, my mind, my body, my heart were with him. And maybe he was already with me too.
On our way back, I received a phone call from my mum letting me know that things had taken a turn for the worse. The following day, on the 22nd of December 2022, he passed away. And these words will never not feel surreal.
On my first visit to Delphi, the gates of the Underworld opened and sucked me in. On the annual celebration of the return of the light, I entered the realm of ultimate darkness. That day, my world as I’d known it cracked open, and the awareness that there was no putting the pieces back together the way they once were has been my faithful companion ever since.
How do I continue to exist in a world that does not include him?
The question I’ve been living, grappling and wrestling with, dancing, sleeping and waking up with.
It is a special kind of psycho-existential f@ckery when you lose someone you have known since their very beginning. It does not make sense, not rationally, but on a visceral, cellular level.
I was 6 years old when my sister gave birth to my first nephew, Nikos (she’s 16 years older than me). To say I was thrilled that we had a new baby in the family is a total understatement —I was obsessed with him! And as a typical, mature Capricorn-child, I started playing little-mum immediately. Give me all the baby-sitting, all the running around on the playground, all the pacing up-and-down till he falls asleep, I’ll do it! In Jungian terms, he was a huge catalyst for the constellation of the mother/care-giver archetype in me.
I had my first (conscious) experience of intuition when he, as an infant, needed to have surgery. I remember walking back home from school that day, sensing that something was not okay, and that it somehow involved him. When I arrived home and my feeling was confirmed, the fear and worry for his well-being coursed through my little body like lightning. That was the beginning of a number of health issues he dealt with throughout his life.
I had the exact same feeling of foreboding the day of his final operation, even after they told us it had been successful and we were just waiting for him to wake up...and then again, two months later in Delphi.
He and his brother, my younger nephew, were a big part of the way I defined myself and tracked the passage of time. “When I’m 25, they will be 19 and 17...we can start going out together. When I’m 35, they’ll be 29 and 27...I wonder where life will have taken us by then. When I’m 40...only one of them will be here.” How is that even possible? How do I keep counting my years, when his will forever remain frozen at 31?
He passed away just hours before the new moon in Capricorn, Capricorn said to hold the gate through which souls depart back into Source. Since his soul left this world, it felt as if mine had been in suspension; not departed, but not fully here either. Hovering somewhere in the in-between.
A month ago, on the new moon in Cancer, I went back to Delphi. Right across from Capricorn, Cancer is said to represent the gate through which souls arrive and become incarnated. I knew that it was time to gather some of my own soul parts that had been captured there two and a half years earlier.
As soon as I stepped into the space, I began feeling very unwell, dizzy, light-headed. My body remembering. I took a pause, drank some water, and kept going, slowly and intentionally, very aware of all that I was carrying with me, all that I was bringing to the altar of my loss.
This time, we walked all the way up to the highest point of the site, and found refuge in the shade of the pine trees. And there, finally, I let it all go. I can’t consciously recall all that happened, all that I felt, but I do remember...
Tears streaming, turning to sobs, turning to laughter; energy currents wildly flowing up and down my body; an irresistible pull to look upward, toward the canopy of the trees, and beyond, feeling the light of the high-summer sun peeking through and somehow calling me forward, washing over so.much.pain. —the two faces of the ekstatic, and of life, meeting each other, blending together.
A threshold.
“Look for me in the trees”, I heard with my eyes closed, and I realised that, in that moment, my experience of him shifted from the localised presence of his human form to him being everywhere. Something I had heard and read about so many times before that would often make me furious, because all I wanted was: his human body, his human body, his human body, back to life!! Right there and then, I tapped into it unintentionally, organically.
It felt like the waking-life equivalent of a dream I had received a few months prior, in which he appeared in front of me, and I pulled him into my arms, only to realise I was hugging energy. Both experiences a non-verbal assurance that, wherever I go from here, I will always take him with me...
Up until that point, even though I had long come out of the initial freeze state and my life continued unfolding externally, there was a deep, underlying resistance, a holding back, a disbelief that there could actually be life after this. That I would ever be able to truly step back in, to say ‘yes’ to going on, to having dreams and desires, to opening myself up to the great unknown of my future, without him. In my heart of hearts, I refused.
And then, under the pine trees that day, in some mysterious, alchemical way I played no part in, I was given back my ‘yes’. Not an innocent, light-hearted, inflated kind of ‘yes, let’s go, all will be okay in the end, anything is possible’ —because it’s not, not always— but a chthonic, earthen, hissing ‘yesss’ grounded in the knowing that all can be lost at any given moment and for as long as I am still here, I am meant to, and want to, be fully here, with it all —and with him, in a new way...
...as if it was he who placed that ‘yes’ in my heart and handed me the keys.
...as if the sweet little baby I once held in my arms shape-shifted into a wise, unbounded presence having my back and nudging me forward, whispering in my ear words of encouragement.
As if he was now my guardian. My ancestor.
“Death is only one way of dying; living partially, living fearfully, is our more common, daily collusion with death.”
― James Hollis
Loss is cruel and crushing, always. And —the personal state and phase of life each loss finds us in gives our experience a very unique shape. Nikos’ passing took place just a few days before I turned 38 and has marked my transition into midlife like nothing else. It initiated the very black, opening phase of my yellowing —the rotting and disintegration of my entire life until then, both personal and professional, as well as the laying down and composting of many of the guiding visions I had for my future, including that of biological motherhood— and has become the prima materia, the foundation of and primary reason behind everything I do.
Both threads of my work, Ekstatic Alchemy and The Yellowing Therapist, have emerged from the crucible of his loss, from this cataclysmic confrontation with grief and the truth of our mortality.
At the heart of both, and my own, is this quest:
Staying alive, while we are still alive.
And living alive includes, presupposes, crossing the threshold of death, symbolic and literal, inner and outer, over and over and over again.
They say that energetically powerful places call to us at very specific, pivotal times on our journey. Delphi, for me, was meant to become the impossible gateway I had to step through twice; the landscape of my Dionysian dismemberment and reconfiguration in a different form (Dionysus co-ruled the Delphic temple after all...). And the place I can always return to, in body or imagination, to meet him.
p.s. I made my second pilgrimage to Delphi with a very dear, long-time friend who was visiting from the US. She is a shamanic practitioner, and as we were walking down the hill from our pine-tree meditation spot, she shared with me that she had asked for a message from my nephew, and this is what she had received: I needed to build a relationship with a cat on the island where we’re spending our summer! I laughed out loud, because I am (was?!) a total dog person, with an unpleasant history with cats, and joked with her that he really wanted to stretch my limits. A couple hours later, and without us having spoken at all, my partner sent me a photo of a cat outside our island home, along with a message saying: “apparently, we have a cat now!”...A month in, the cat and I are practically glued to each other.
Whatever meaning we each want to attach to this encounter, to me, she’s magic... <3
Thank you for writing this! I cried reading it. I feel blessed to have walked with you for so long and to have witnessed your journey through the liminal thresholds of life/death/life. This piece is truly powerful xx
This is such a beautiful and personal story, thank you for sharing this part of your soul ❤️🩹