The May Day bank holiday weekend has, for the last sixteen years, been a bittersweet time of year. When the summer is bursting through in all its fine greenery, and traditional May Day festival rites welcome in the luscious fertility of this time, I am keeping a great lament, for this is the time that I gave birth to death instead of new life. My son Vincent was stillborn on Monday 2 May 2006.

As a death doula, I’ve been making time for my personal grief tending, besides enjoying the new life abound in our beautiful green South Downs. I made a pilgrimage up to my sacred, healing hill, which has been a place of recovery for me down the years, and a place where my own magical practice has flourished and deepened.

After an early morning visit to the old chalk pit hawthorn tree, which is in a relationship with an ivy deeply entwined around its trunk and branches, I climbed the steep hill to the Bronze Age burial mound where I undertook my overnight Utiseta in 2020. There I spent time in contemplation and ceremony, in relationship with my Scottish ancestors who celebrated Beltane with fires and rituals on the hill tops around Birse in Aberdeenshire. I travelled to Ireland to dance with my ancestors there, and then all my Sussex ancestors joined us whose lands I looked out across from my elevated position.

Most of all, I spent time with my son. Imagining how he might be now at sixteen. When someone dies, our relationship lives on, very much alive, if we let it. It can be a very rich,rewarding relationship in ‘spirit’, and the communication continues. I’ve also found that reading to the dead is a great act of love and grief tending. So I spent time reading aloud to my son, and in doing so he responded. Reading to him followed by deep listening, writing and song, allows me to cultivate a sense of knowing this child who I felt grow and move inside me. His birth changed my life, just as a child changes any parents life.

Reading to the dead is a practice I want to develop further, as part of my offering as a death doula.

Today, I am so grateful, for although I shall always carry a great grief at the physical absence of my son (I have no other living children), I feel blessed to be able to walk, talk and grow with him, as we both grow in spirit.

His words to me for his sixteenth birthday were these, after reading some tales from the Over the Nine Waves, A book of Irish legends by Marie Heaney.

Bua Beltane Boy

Mother do not weep for me

as we climb this hill together

For the sun god shines upon us

the fires are lit and the cattle freed

from disease for another year.

The soil is blessed

and bluebells carpet

the forest where I sleep

after a night of May Day merry making

with my sweet, sweet love.

She is fair, as bonny and blue eyed

as the Straits of Moyle

on a calm day

when the swan songs of Lir

blow ashore.

Mother, do not weep for me

for today I am sixteen summers,

fast becoming a man

the grandfathers remind me

that you became a woman at sixteen

when, banished from the castle,

you took your sword and planted it

with an Irishman at your side.

There began the great betrayal.

But Mother it is over now

the battles you fought,

and for me,

the longest, hardest battle lost,

though the ancestors tell me

I had tried to enter your middle world too soon

I was not ready,

so, they called me back

for another lifetime of learning

for they had much to teach you through me,

from this side of the veil.

I know now how to raid cattle

to ride my horse faster than the wind

to make a leather heron bag

to carry my magic as I leap

from stone mountain to stone mountain

to stand on the Cliffs of Moher

for to dive and cartwheel with red-legged choughs

as my black wings spread strong and firm.

For I am dochloite and you named me

Uinseann.

As I navigate the nine waves

to stand on the shores of Ireland

know that, as Amergin before me:

"I am the wind on the sea

I am the wave of the ocean

I am a powerful bull

I am an eagle on the rock

I am the brightness of the sun

I am a fierce wild boar

I am a salmon in the pool

I am the wisdom of art

I am the spear, sharp in battle

I am the god that puts fire in the brain"

Mother, know that I am also underground

in the sidhes and the cairns

in the world of beauty imperishable

in this Land of the Ever Young

although I age, it is not within earthly time,

in this place with the grandmothers and the grandfathers,

on your mother's and father's,

on my father's mother's side.

Mother, be gentle on my father,

forgive him,

for his faraway grief for me

is locked away in his salmon bag

locked away in the ghetto

where the Mermaid of Warsaw

is calling forth another cycle,

one which is also my birthright,

that too you would be telling me,

so why not tell it now,

why not unlock the stories

from my father's leather satchel

in all their complexity,

I wish to hear you sing them.

So, Mother, lament no more

for I am your bonny, bua Beltane Boy.

Uinseann

Uinseann

Uinseann