Tahlequah

This story is breaking my heart. It reaches right into new fissures in me that pulse with the primal universality of motherhood, and the suffering of children lost.

Today, I cried for this whale and her grief. I cried for black mothers interviewed on the radio, who were never told of extra risks their babies faced, part of the stresses of living under racism. Tears for the ruptured families seeking safety here in my country, only for infants to be kidnapped by a hostile government and misplaced within uncaring chaos.

I grieve with these mothers, even as I hold my own child close. I rage at the specific cruelty of humankind, but also find myself impaled on the animal emotion of delicate new life broken in so many ways, despite the love and care bursting forth from mothers of every kind.

I think of the lost children in my own family, those missing from their places, whose absence echoes through generations. I feel the pain of friends whose babies did not make it, often secretly held in the silence of miscarriage.

Tahlequah swims with her precious baby, her grief echoing that thing all mothers know too well. Her devotion cannot carve out a place for her spirit to rest, holding in her heart the intimate knowledge of the little being that is gone.

I despair that that love is not enough, because it is the core of my offering and I quake in fear that it will be bereft and inadequate.

Would that I could mend the Earth, and spare these sacred bonds such harm. There is so much healing to be done in us human animals, and our pain multiplies in the world around us. Life's longing for itself perseveres, fragmented and wounded by injustice and disregard.

May we all be kinder, and work to buttress each other. Strength is so tender, really.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/researchers-searched-all-day-for-grieving-orca-mother-they-found-her-still-clinging-to-calf/