It is not a mother’s place to live longer than her child—this our Mother Earth grinds into our hearts and wombs—there is an order and a place to life and death. We have learned this, the mothers, not from watching the ways of living, but from the imprint of our goddess Evolution on our cells, our brains, our flesh. It is known.

I began to think of her as grown, my daughter, who roamed the earth as if all of it was hers to keep, and gathered all its children in her arms—

She was a mother in her own right before she ever bore the children she and I would love with fierce attention, grinding them into the stony fire of the ground and pulling them, arms limping, to the boundless sky.

It was hard, even when she was seventeen and still a child, still a babe of this trial, to remind myself she was not so ferocious as her wilding hair, not so boundless as her deepest dreams, and so I made her thus: I left her growing, simply growing, on her own. When she called our satellite phone to say, so calm, the house next door is burning, I was not surprised. When she ran across the earth in 1989, out of reach of landlines and barely held by letters, I knew her to be extraordinary. She was everything she wanted to be and she was okay, floating on the waves of change as if she had called them there herself.

And so it becomes, this turning in the end of my long life lived, that I endure the noticing only now of what I knew in my womb: she was drowning. She is my daughter, after all, and so what she hid from her own children peaked out the edges of her mouth as she said good-bye those nights, to drive her family home through the snow and bitter air, her breath condensing in the ways I knew myself of sadness, boundless and despaired.

Her daughter returned her ashes to the earth,

and so I salt it with my tears.

It is not a mother’s place, to lose her child. This is the agony of motherhood, the knowledge of the way of life and the knowledge of the way of genes. The one which tells us we can lose them, and the one that tells us we must not. It is this we know, with our blood and bones and milk: our lives are their protection. And if we break upon the rocks of life, we must pray, and pray, and pray.

It is a daughter’s place, to live longer than her mother. To step along the footsteps of her story as it fades from the earth. We have learned this, the daughters, from our mothers’ lips, as they tell us of the world. We know this, and we press against and into them, we leave and then return to them, forever in the knowledge of our coming grief.

I am a holder

of many gifts,

and many traumas,

passed from mother to

daughter, to mother again

in this line of giving that stretches

from the dampened dirt of burials and

the dusted ashes of cremations, to the

soles of my feet, planted flat upon this

earth. Those secrets of deaths and

destinies that I hide within my

weary chest were born by

mother and daughter

before me, before you,

before us. They whisper to

me the rites of love, as I honor

the mother of my own body, the

giver of life and death who joined them

all too soon. They whisper to me the rites of

death and living, in the rending memories of all

their number. It is all those who lost their mothers

and daughters who tell me that this is the agony.

And so they welcome their newest spirit, come

to them in all the love of mothers who

embrace the heart of breaking, who

set their bodies in the way of loss.

I hold this, even as she leaves us,

her daughter, her mother,

to stand alone in the

swirling dust of

losing her.