I lost my only child before birth on April 30, 1990, just before turning 40. Over the last 31 years my mourning has morphed into peaceful celebration.
I was not told the gender of my lost child but sensed it was a girl. A woman claiming psychic ability told me the baby was too “high vibration” to incarnate. My child had big plans. I honored her essence and found a number of ways to birth her energy into the world. Years later, I named her Grace Gaia—Grace on Earth.
Each year on April 30, I float dried roses, saved from winter bouquets, on the pond above the barn to thank Grace Gaia for all the love she has inspired in the world even without her physical presence. There are always plenty of roses. Friends have taken some with them to be left elsewhere in nature. Grace Gaia’s roses have found their way to the base of a waterfall in Switzerland and the Ganges River in India.
This year, my usual co-celebrants could not be here in person because of COVID-19. Grace and Grace Gaia worked their magic anyway. My friends called, emailed, and sent a card with extra rose petals for the pond.
A new friend came to celebrate for the first time. Tom is a certified wildlife biologist who works for The Nature Conservancy in Vermont. (TNC owns the land above the pond.) He is the Dad of two young daughters. We swap poetry by email. A first responder in his unimaginable spare time, he is fully vaccinated, as I am. He arrived at 10:00 not knowing what to expect.
It was a windy, rainy day. Just as Tom arrived, the weather took a break. Will helped us carry baskets of roses up to the pond. We stood on the bank, and tossed the multi-colored flowers onto the water.
They drifted with the changeable breeze, like a murmuration of birds. As we stood in reverence and wonder, something caught my eye to the right of us on the bank of the pond. It was an abandoned duck egg. There are two pairs of ducks on the pond this spring, but they were nowhere to be seen. We looked closely. The egg was whole.
We left the egg where it was and came back down the hill. Heather arrived, and I told her about it. She raises ducks. She took one of the empty rose baskets and a clean, white washcloth up to the pond. She carefully picked up the egg and took it home to her incubator.
It was not viable.
On Mother’s Day, the ducks were back on the pond. A mother duck wanted me to know she’s with me. Graceful Mischief.