Taboo

I am in the process of reading a book by Cheryl Strayed called "Wild".  It is a true story of her hiking the Pacific Crest Trail which I find fascinating.

In that book she also works through her mother's premature death and describes how she spread the ashes, but kept the larger bone chunks which she then swallowed whole.

I'm not sure about you but this made me feel uncomfortable since it challenged my boundaries.  Ingesting my mother's bones would never have crossed my mind.  Instead of dismissing it because it felt uncomfortable and weird (taboo?), I decided to think and feel into her situation.  The mother told her children many times "I will always be with you."  By ingesting the bones and digesting them it was a physical way of her mother becoming part of her and making sure she would literally always be with her.

There was probably a lot of desperation too, a deep need to be connected.  Anyone who has lost a loved one knows how deep that despair can go and how big the chasm can be.

The reason I am writing about this is to encourage you when you come across something that challenges your beliefs to dig into it and attempt to understand where and why you are being stretched.  Go into a compassionate space and put yourself, to the best of your ability, into the other person's shoes and see if you can make sense of it.  It helps you grow as a person.  While I don't know if I would ingest my mother's bones when the time comes, the possibility is now part of my reality.