The Merciless Mother Scream With Victoria Markham

When her three-and-a-half-year-old-son, Koa, died suddenly in a home accident, Victoria Markham was thrust into the world of grief. Her documentary RE:MEMBER is an inside look at working with the beauty and pain of grief. Today, we’re talking about releasing guilt associated with the death of a loved one, avoiding cultural appropriation in grief rituals, and how grief shows up… even years and years later.

Transcript

Victoria,

I'm so glad you're here with us today on coming back to share your story and talk about the project that came from it.

So if you could please start off with your lost story for us.

Great,

I was a,

You know,

Mother of two little boys.

I had Koa,

Who was three,

Almost four,

And Bannion,

Who was seven and a half,

And been married for at that point 14,

15 years.

We own a home on five acres here in Ashland,

Oregon,

And I was out for the day and I was on my way home.

I drove down the driveway.

It's kind of a ritual where the boys would run off the yard and come up to my truck and I would bring home some sort of treat and then they would run through the garden and over to my parking spot and this day somehow my youngest Koa followed my car instead of running through the garden and his brother was running through the garden and I just assumed that Koa was behind him and when I turned into my parking spot my little one Koa got in between my car and the rock wall and I didn't see him and I turned into my parking spot and my tire knocked him over and he fell and he hit his head on the rock wall and I got out of the car.

I saw him in the rearview mirror and I got out of the car and I thought,

You know,

Broken leg,

Something injured,

Maybe knocked out,

But never did it cross my mind that death was imminent,

You know,

Until I turned him over and I could see clearly he was in the active dying process and so I,

You know,

I swooped him up and put him in the car.

We lived close to a fire station and I felt like that was the fastest way to get the help I needed and so I had somebody calling 911 and I was driving him around the block to the fire station and by the time I got there and got him out of the car he just pretty much died in my arms right then and of course,

You know,

The on-site personnel did everything they could as well as the ambulance and then onto the emergency room,

But it was clear that,

You know,

That he was already gone and so in the emergency room they had him all hooked up and they were doing all of this,

You know,

Work to try and save his life and of course that makes your heart race,

Like maybe there's a chance,

You know,

I don't know how far back from the dead you can be brought and at one point I sat down by his head and was stroking his hair and just talking to him,

You know,

And just letting him know that if he didn't want to stay,

If he wasn't meant to be here,

That I would let him go and I got this really strong voice inside that just said,

Mama,

I'm too hurt and if I come back I'll never be able to live a normal life,

You know,

I just want to go and at that point I just stood up and screamed and that merciless mother scream,

You know,

Just pow,

You know,

And everybody just pulled back and he took the monitors off and then began the grief journey of just really what it was to let him go,

You know,

The project that came out of that,

You know,

Came to me kind of on the wind,

You know,

I was just pursuing all kinds of cultures and readings and understandings about death and dying,

You know,

Just really looking into how to save myself.

I think that the culture I belong to here believes this is the worst thing that could happen to anybody,

You know,

There was a lot of big gray blankets as my teachers and us would say,

You know,

Put over me as irrecoverable and just,

You know,

Watched like I was going to go off the deep end and I was determined to not let that be my story for many reasons and I sought out various cultures and different ways of grieving and death and dying outside of the American culture and I realized that there were so many intact cultures that really had ways to process grief and that we had pretty much made grief extinct in our culture,

You know,

Traded it in for the joy and the happiness of life and that,

You know,

When grief hit it was something you wanted to get rid of as soon as possible,

You know,

And I tried the grief groups and all kinds of things here and it was like in the middle of old folks' homes,

You know,

With a tissue and a teddy bear in the middle of the room and everyone just gray and looking down and,

You know,

Eyes cast down and no energy in the room and I was just not,

I was not going to let that be my story and I started doing some training,

You know,

Because really the most intelligent conversation I felt like people were having in America was in the death doula trainings,

You know,

So I started sitting bedside for people and going to trainings about death doula work and on the way home from one training I was with a friend and she said,

Can you tell me the story of Koa's death and I just shared it with her and she said,

I feel like I just watched a movie and a lot like everything else along the grief process in between the like really down can't get off the ground stages were just these moments of total clarity of just like go here next,

You know,

And I had this light go off in my head that just said you're going to make a movie and it's like I'm going to make a movie,

You know,

Like I don't know the first thing about making a movie,

I don't know anybody who makes movies,

You know,

I don't have any clue but I felt the compelling nature of my story in the culture and whether that came from the morbid curiosity of people and or just people that I had crossed paths with that were trying to really maneuver grief,

I felt like there was energy for it in this culture to be received and I told my friend that I was sitting with that I had thought maybe I would make a movie and she said,

Well,

I have a friend who's a documentary filmmaker and she's coming next week and so the story goes that I met with,

You know,

Katie Teague and she indeed did take on my documentary and,

You know,

She wrote the story and just told me where to be and how to do it and I just continued to do my grief work with others and intertwined my life with intelligence around grief and out came this film which has turned out to be a very personal story,

You know,

It is the story of my life intertwined with the story of my son's death intertwined with my failing marriage intertwined with,

You know,

Me and my offerings into the world in the grief world,

I feel like I have a good solid five-year contribution here that I need to make into the grief world,

It's just too,

It's too naked,

You know,

The grief world in our culture to turn away from and knowing what I had to walk through and what I maneuvered and what I was able to collect as resources,

I just can't consciously turn away from the people who are coming next and not make a contribution,

I really feel passionate that those of us that are grievers and we are making it through somehow and I don't mean getting over,

I mean making it through,

That it's our responsibility to turn around and to help and show others how to do the same because there's just nowhere to go in our culture,

There's just nowhere to go,

There's people,

Beautiful people like you who are,

You know,

Sending out the word that there's not enough of us and so I'm collecting people and creating resources and giving back and right now my film is out and I'll tell you how to see that at the end of the podcast.

I do want to drop the name of it really quickly for anybody who wants to pause the podcast and look it up,

What's the name of the documentary?

You can find it under remember,

All one word,

R-e-m-e-m-b-e-r doc,

Doc.

Com,

So rememberdoc.

Com and everything you need to know is on the website there including if you want to bring the film to your own community,

There's showing packages and Katie's organized everything really beautifully on the website.

I've seen it before and that's really exciting to have all put together.

I will tell you I have a lot of questions and a lot of different directions I think we could go with our conversation.

The first one that really sprang forward for me are these three words,

I literally wrote them down in all caps,

Fault,

Responsibility,

And guilt and this is not the first time on this podcast that we've had someone come on and inadvertently caused an accident where their child died.

Grief growers who are listening who don't know what I'm talking about can go back and listen to the episode with Julie Clough and I wonder how you have reckoned with this notion of I was the one in the driver's seat.

You know interesting enough I think that there was probably 99% of the people around me that really feared that that would be you know the pitfall for me and I don't know what saved me there honestly.

Shelby I could name a bunch of things but I'm just gonna for the sake of time I'm just gonna tell you that it just never came for me.

You know the guilt never came for me.

It just didn't process through my mind that I would ever do anything to ever hurt my child you know so therefore if I were to take on guilt I would have to say I'm guilty for what you know I was not speeding,

I was not on substance,

I was not negligent,

I was not not paying attention and even if I even if those things were true too like the cycle of guilt is like the cycle of guilt is really just not a serving energy when it comes to grief.

It does need to be processed if it's present but for me I just felt like Victoria you would have never done anything to hurt Koah ever ever ever and so therefore we're not going to go down that road there's so many other things that you have to take care of so it's just my health and the state that I arrived at Koah's death in was in a resolve around that way of thinking already and so when I hit Koah with my car and the guilt was the question it just my mind was already too healthy for that and my spirit was already on to how am I going to save my other boy and what do I do to save myself and my family and I just didn't do it I didn't go there and I can tell you I don't know how these things work I don't reach into the other side of the mystery I've crossed the veil of myself several times in different ways but I leave it a mystery and I can tell you that my son's death was not meant to destroy me it was not meant for some sort of self-help inversion onto what kind of person I am or am not it was really it was really just his path off the planet and I really believe that I midwife that path and that can sound really strange in the modern day world the way we think about things because we're supposed to be taking response ability and so I did take response ability I picked him up I took him to the hospital I laid there I bawled with him I wept him I cried him for years I ritualized him I turned around and gave back to my culture and my community to me that is responding with an ability and so I did take responsibility and I continue to take responsibility for the life I created and the life that I was a part of taking off this planet and the two uh bookends there weave together in a really powerful way to give life and to take life and so there's a whole podcast probably I could do just on that I get chills hearing you say this because that's something that's never crossed my mind before and I'm sure has never crossed the minds of other grief growers who are listening because I think so much of and maybe this is a a product of grief culture in the western world but so much of it is how can I take all of this pain and turn it right back in on myself via guilt shame blame fault responsibility in all of these dark shadowy ways and I can't tell you how many gravers I hear from especially those whose children have died whether as a byproduct of their actions or something totally otherwise there's still this circling story of I am somehow at fault I caused this I made this happen this was a result of something that I did whether just as a parent entity or the real actions that were taken so this reframing of response ability to respond to what happened as opposed to take and shoulder all of the blame for what happened is very very very very eye-opening and yeah I think you're right I think when you just say it out loud and it's one sentence it can sound really trite but in practice I mean at least in your world it sounds like something that you've leaned into over and over and over again is how can I respond to this and you've made it the focus of your world in a different way absolutely it's just what you know what is it gonna do and I don't negate you know what I'm saying doesn't negate the people that are carrying guilt and shame but I would venture to say that it comes it comes from other places you know we're already a guilty or shame-ridden kind of person in ourselves or you know there's already that pre-existing notion that of cause and effect you know and I think you know we hurt each other all the time you know on the face of the earth you know and what does it mean to take responsibility for the ways that we interact and the ways that we affect another and is that to invert on ourselves and become shameful you know it doesn't go anywhere that actually just creates more conflict between you and the person it creates more work and distance and then eventually when you get healthy enough you come to the place where you can respond with ability and so I've always really I've always really believed and have made a practice in my life out of preparing for hard times you know I if you see the film you'll notice a theme in my life it started very young where there was just tremendous amounts of horrible horrible things to survive you know things that we consider in this culture really unlucky and I knew from the start of life pretty much at cognitive level that I that I was here to kind of feel a lot of energy and so I hung out with some very intelligent people that really helped me understand how to maintenance myself all along the way and I really believe that you know part of my whole understanding that I'm trying to create in the grief world is that you know let's just give percentages because our world loves them so you know 80 percent of of how you will feel when you grieve is is how you already feel in your life today you know and 80 percent of how you will grieve depends on how much grief work you've been able to do when that big event hits your life you know and it's not if it's when and so grief work really happens in advance you know it's not something you wait until the big grief happens and then you have to like completely go through every last bit of grief all at once over time you know if you do the maintenance in your life and you and you look you know for places where you can continue to empty out and clean your psyche and clean your your physical body out of the grief and clean your disappointments out and your sadnesses and help with your thinking and how you see life you know when those bigger griefs happen there's actually a thing called post-traumatic growth you know where people excel after large grief you know not without sadness but they'll actually come into a place of resource rather than a place of lack or guilt or shame so i don't want everybody listening to be vetted for this downward spiral of grief some of us and some of you actually will find it invigorating and life-enforcing and make you want to live more and do more and be more than sit in a puddle of guilt and shame and sadness you know and to me you're going to experience it all you know but how long you stay in each of those stages is directly relational to your your mental health at the time that something occurs in your life you know i happen to have been in a very sound mind and and healthy spiritual state when koa died so i give thanks for that i agree with this idea of post-traumatic growth this is something that we've also discussed previously on coming back and i've seen operate in my own world as well because there is an inevitable growth that comes from grief that's the tagline of this podcast is because even through grief we are growing because through this experience no matter what you are doing things seeing things feeling things learning things that you would not have otherwise had you not grieved and there is growth in that even if you don't see it immediately recognize that you're not going to be able to live that way recognize it or even lean into it so i think growth is definitely a reality in the aftermath of loss i want to talk about and you mentioned this just a little bit the impact that koa's death had on your other son kind of logistically whether there was a fear of cars in your house that kind of came up after koa's death or like the ritual of running to the driveway again if that changed at all and maybe how your relationship changed alongside him as well yeah well you know immediately one of the healing you know one of the healing paths i took was to create ritual like all over the place and so the ritual you know ritual is kind of a plug word and in you know previous cultures more intact cultures and we consider it spiritual in our culture but it's not you know it's a ceremony it's like a birthday all the rituals that we do to live you know they're to me it's psychology and motion it's just the act of movement and objects and using your psyche and objects to move energy it's a non-verbal way to heal and part of my ritual that i did was to completely make a walkway and and cut off the whole part of that driveway remove the rock wall i took the stone that he hit his head on and i made his head stone out of it and had it carved with his name and the rest of the rock wall was torn away and hauled off and i made a beautiful rock a beautiful walkway to that spot and i put in a memorial garden for him and so nobody ever drove down that that path ever again you know my son my older son is now almost 14 and i would say that children have a different timeline for grieving i would say that right now what i'm seeing out of my son is the grief and yes you know for years we went all over the world he traveled to mexico with us to do dia silas mortez you know we went to nalo reservation out in arizona we would do elaborate you know seekings and he always was there with us doing it all you know and of course it looked like he was just going to be fine and i don't know i'd say maybe three years ago it started where he just collapsed and his nervous system went down and he started spending time in his room and not really coming out and now it's near impossible to get him into a car and so we are experiencing the ptsd with banyan now you know and it was true is that i noticed everybody had their own timing we just all took turns you know and i don't think he could really grieve until he saw his parents on their feet you know and once we were kind of back up and on our feet again especially me we had another baby i had my daughter coral when i was 43 she's the rainbow baby and she's five now and you know until life kind of came to a little bit more of a homeostasis here i don't think my son was going to let any of the emotions and um you know so we're in an active process of healing with him now you know and here it is seven years later and so you never know when that grief is going to hit a lot of people feel feel okay for years and then don't you know and that would be my son you know for sure that's a really great reminder to have out there in the world because even i mean even for adults one of the things that i hear the most often is it's been 10 years why am i still thinking about this i'm like because it wasn't you didn't get it out in the first wash you know what i mean it's like we gotta we gotta process this again and again and again and through different stages and different lifetimes and different i mean he knows more now at 14 than he did then when koa died and so he's got more life experience and more exposure to you and the new baby as well and so there's just much more information to assimilate and the fact remains that my younger brother is not here and so continuing to grieve that together is really hard so like in the forefront of my mind almost always when working with greevers this word of course like of course we would see this again almost seven years later and that's okay like that's just how it shows up for him and that's okay um i think the next place i want to move into with you is this process of seeking because this is a big conversation right now about how are we ensuring that we are culturally appreciating as opposed to culturally appropriating and taking these rituals from other spaces that don't necessarily belong to us and using them for our purposes and then discarding the rest so i wonder if you've given any thought to that in your work as you've processed koa's death and then made this documentary that's now out in the world absolutely you know i and mind you i've been given permission you know to use ceremony that i've been exposed to and i still culturally i will participate but i do not take from other people's cultures and try and mimic and or repeat you know what it is that they have taught me there's some basic things you'll see in the film like smudging but you know my native american auntie i call her auntie um was there and you know i feel when they're present it's okay for me to practice what they practice because that's more out of respect you know that i would use smudge on her and that i would use smudge in her presence or do you know prayer ties things that you know that come from her tradition when when i have somebody traditional with me i will use their practices out of respect when i'm in a group of my own Caucasian people or you know there's no cultural known ceremony present in a circle i stay away from those things honestly i believe that there's too much anger and resentment and there's also so much grief that hasn't been resolved culturally about how we've crossed over with our indigenous and so that's a whole nother thing it was really important to me when i was asked um you know to do a grief ritual for the film one of my major components was i will not put anything uh from my indigenous families in there i i have to have a grief ritual that is repeatable for anybody and i don't want to take you know from other cultures to do it and so i sat a long time with a couple of things like the kintsugi which i do you know in my ritual of bowl breaking and then painting the lines with gold and i looked up online and called somebody who is from the Japanese culture and asked and this is a this is cross-cultural it doesn't belong to one culture so there was a permission there to go ahead and use it there's there's so many things we can do so many ways we can be with each other that that does not become cultural and culturally inappropriate and using water and fire and using you know altars and ritual has you know been around all the way through the European times it's not just indigenous cultures that did that actually the you know the i mean that just goes into a whole nother level of conversation i'll just say that we as European people had you know the use of water and fire and bathing and steam and cleansing and all sorts of ways and all sorts of ways of using herbs and things to help cleanse ourselves but we lost our pheromones you know so we don't have them so i i really feel like wailing and crying and making altars and breaking things and gluing them back together and using fire and water to cleanse these are all things that are human they're not gonna belong to anybody so to me i call it rewilding like the grief ritual has to be a sense of rewilding where we kind of go back to what is given to us through the wild nature of of the earth we belong to and those plants and those things and that fire and that water and all those things do not belong to anybody they're not anybody we've all used them every culture on the earth has used them so those are the things i really like to stay with thank you for going there with me because i know in this day and age with everybody not everybody a lot of people making the complaint that everything these days is too pc i'm like really conscious of the things i do now that exclude the actual culture and then take from just the practice and i've never had that conversation in a grief space before so thank you for for going there with us and pointing to this idea that there are things that have belonged to many if not all cultures across time that are quote unquote like safe to use or accessible immediately to all and honoring too that in some instances like the bowl breaking or like other practices i either practice them only in the presence of people who they belong to or i've gone to somebody who can't be a part of the culture and i've been to a lot of people who are not in the presence of people who are not in the presence of somebody who can grant permission or who can train me in this and give me the history of it so that i can practice with that full wisdom i just think that's really really important as well i want to point out something that you said is that a lot of the work that you do is about rewilding and i instantly kind of go back to our roots going back to being human going back to these ancient grief practices that have now fallen out of practice in modern day western culture and at the very beginning of our conversation you said there was a voice that prompted you to go here next and yet so much of what you do is about going back and so i really think that just just so much of the work that you're putting out into the world is drawing from these old old roots and bringing them up towards the future i just get this sense that the voice of go here next is really about look back and bring forward with you i'm taking a moment to appreciate how that voice has guided you in your work because i think that so much of grief work today feels this pressure to be pioneering and to be discovering something new there's so many books out about the the missing stage the sixth stage this you know the mystery component of grief when in reality i think there's so much benefit into looking looking back to how previous cultures have done things i do want to talk about this merciless mother scream that you talked about at the beginning of our interview and again with things like wailing or keening coming from other cultures and where that comes from for you and how you felt permission to make that kind of sound in a space that's so institutionalized as a hospital there is no awareness of environment when when that scream comes it doesn't really matter where you are or who's around there is no there's just nothing that stop that can stop it it is primal instinctual and in some way now i recognize it as that what stage that's what saves you you know is is that your body knows to just do it and not hold you know and not look around and see if anyone's watching that level of loss it's just there's nothing that could stand in the way of that scream and that scream didn't just happen in the hospital it happened over and over again through my neighborhood when i would walk i would go down by the creek and i would scream and there you know when i started to come back into my body out of the shock a little bit more i did start to feel like can anybody hear me and then i asked myself if i really cared and i didn't you know it was like i i'm saving myself right now you know and i actually wrote a lot about that screen because it wasn't it wasn't a screen that i had ever made before it wasn't a sound that had ever come out of me in before ever and it was really a mix between like an animal cry and a toning like if you hear the the monks toning and then a primal kind of like you could just picture clawing your way up to the heavens you know kind of feeling inside and it would just come out in all these different tones and sounds and it it made me want to get down on all fours you know and become wild it just was so primal and so beyond there was nothing i could do to bring them back and there was nothing i could do about the level of longing and so this to me the scream was that that acknowledgement of the pain and that i knew i was going to carry forever and then the the longing for where's my baby you know where is my baby and how do i find him and who has him and where did he go and so that scream um you know now it's interesting i just went to a grief ritual with francis weller he's in my film i really love him a lot and you know we were in the mercy center in san francisco and it was very institutional you know um place and i had done a lot of grief rituals with some bonfusome who's from the digara tribe of africa and she's passed on uh since then but i would i would sit in the grief ritual and i'd watch her go down to the altar and she would just instantly just completely and totally wail like there was nothing between her and the grief inside of her and she would just instantly go into wailing and crying and letting it all go and then she'd stand up and walk back and continue drumming and meeting the grief ritual and i was like how does she do that you know and how she's so free in her grief how does she let that move in her i went to francis's grief ritual and here i am you know seven and a half years later and i went to the altar and i sat down and i you know everyone was in a contained kind of grief and i just let loose you know my cries my screams my knee my tears you know my breathing and i just let it happen and then i got up and i walked away and smiled at the people who were there to greet me and continued dancing until it was time to go back to the grief altar again you know it's like and then when i asked francis after the grief ritual i said what is that how did i how is that that we can do that and he said you now know how to grieve you know how to grieve you've taught yourself how to be a greever and i just everything inside of me just you know it was like i had arrived at some sort of beautiful art that i never imagined i would ever ever get a hold of in any way shape or form because it ran me for so many years that grief ran my life you know and so learning that art of how to truly let the ha let it happen the screen happen and then get up and cook dinner you know so that's a little bit about the screen i love this notion of you just taught yourself how to grieve because i think that's essentially what all of us are trying to do is teach ourselves what grief looks like to us and then how to grieve over and over and over again victoria i've so loved this conversation with you and

Reviews

I hate how your podcasts always seem to end mid sentence. Maybe it’s a round about way to illustrate how grief stops and goes thru our lives. I appreciate this guest. I live in the Rogue Valley, Veronica is a neighbor. May she find peace, May she be well. Much love.