For Kerri ní Dochartaigh, 2024 brought growth, loss and light.

Tenderness warning: this piece contains details of pregnancy loss.

Some years give us answers, and some years give us questions, and there are other years, still, that simply are. That are not there to ask, or to answer; that are there just because we are. Years that are reminders – fiercely as well as tenderly, achingly as well as gently, heartbreakingly as well as beautifully – that we are alive. 

Alive, alive, oh! We are still here, and fuck is this some place for one place. 

This home we share. 

Our exquisite earth. 

Our mother.

The first day of the year brought rain so heavy it felt like a warning song.

We stood, hundreds of us, lining a beach on the west coast of Ireland, trying, against all the odds, to fly kites in the newly born year’s first storm. A hundred children a day on average had been killed in Gaza for a hundred days in a row. The children of the world had begun asking the adults of the world to protect the children of Palestine. My child, normally the last one standing in any storm, begging to be returned to our car. His dada, desperate, hopeful – despite it all – taking his son’s place in the freezing rain. Returning to us many minutes later; record-store-bag-kite in tatters, shivering-drowning-story-book- rat; still hopeful. 

The following week, in the frost, dancing right before my grateful eyes, a firecrest. 

My first for many years. 

How bright hope burns, how bright (how bright.)  

February was cold, and green, and beautiful.

We lit, in the earth, my wee one and I, a candle.

In as well as for: earth candle.

Into that same earth, we sowed seed after seed after seed; hopeful, bright.

We pulled, from the soil beneath our feet, my son’s first home-grown carrots. He squealed with delight, and it was a good, good thing. All children should have been sowing seeds then; watching the season unfurl in the land that is their home. 

Bliain, a leap year.

A thin day: moon-flock.

Planted broadbeans and sweetpeas in the soil in my first polytunnel.

International Women’s Day.

Mother’s Day in Gaza. 

Two mothers killed there every hour.

Wit(h)ness.

Oh, and tulips. Tulips. My heart.

My son in a sky-blue tee shirt, with fly agaric on it, beneath a sky-blue sky.

I started my first compost heap.

I watched Mary Lattimore in a unitarian church as my lover danced in and out of sleep beside me. How lucky we are.

‘Put it up there, on your seed desk mama’ – the gift of an exquisite, fallen nest, from my wee one, at Easter.

Eclipse season arrived, to remind and mind us; to make the shadow visible; to guide us onwards.

The broadbeans flowered, a perfect chocolate hare was savoured, and I passed my theory test.

The bluebells came back, then the cuckoo flower, then the cuckoo herself.

The peas grew taller than my son, and the treecreeper came most mornings.

I sat in glorious sunshine in the garden and ripped up my son’s baby clothes to make him birthday bunting. Using my hands – the rhythm and ritual of mending and making – is the only way for me to fully process the vast changes matrescence placed into those hands.

May all beings know what it feels like to be loved in ways that call the hands of those around us into the quiet, transformative actions of tenderness.

Féile na Bealtaine.

Bright Fire.

Season of light, but what does light really mean?

And how do we make it?

Bluebells.

Plantain.

Daisies.

Herb Robert.

Common Vetch.

A garland left on our doorstep, for protection.

I watched, on my phone, as the light filled the morning sky, a toddler die on a table in a field hospital in Rafah. I watched as my own toddler stretched, cat-like; his sleepy golden face leaving the land of sleep and returning to the land of the living. Later he will ask me, as I photograph the green shoots of the poppies we grew together: ‘mama, are you making light?’

The purple peas grew taller than me.

Everything, everywhere, was green, and I let it take hold of me.

Imagine if we all could sow seeds, in the soil we love, and know that – when they grew – we would still be there to tend them.

Earth tending is heart tending.

We gathered, every day, armfuls of the rainbow, that we ourselves had grown.

I drove our car for the first time.

I sat on a stage with Ocean Vuong and talked about love and grief, and it was a good, good thing.

The Falling- In-Love poppies bloomed, and oh my did I fall in love.

And yellow courgette, and purple borage. These quiet, soft, miraculous things.

Summer Solstice, and Saint John’s Eve.

Brightness reigned, and I was ready.

Purple carrots, and a pine marten.

Then a party to celebrate forty and a half years on this exquisite, ethereal earth.

I dressed old camp tables with flowers I grew myself, we all brought food, and the stars twinkled the whole night long. How will any of us ever get over this life?

The seventh month was songs of beauty. 

Joyful bees, butterflies, dragonflies, moths and me.

Cornflowers and Calendula beyond any, and all words. 

And gifts in the early, early morning: grass from my babe ‘to make your merry wish’.

Fennel, too, and clover. Also: long-tailed tits, the treecreeper, and stillness on the lane.

I made hedgerow tea and tallow soap, and the corncockles broke my heart with their beauty.

In August I hand pollinated the squash whilst eating a chocolate lolly in the shape of a crescent moon.

I took my babe to Wales and knew joy unlike any I ever have before.

We danced on coastal paths, spent wet days in market towns, sang our hearts out in the garden and woke with the larks. We bought red tractors, ate honey ice-cream and read dog-eared children’s books. It was the best, best time.

The China Asters bloomed, I went to Cornwall, and my wee one started kindergarten.

We saved seeds, made stars, baked crumble, and read about wild woods and brave creatures.

September brought magic along, and I was glad.

A book about mushroom folk; a sleepover in Connemara; a beautiful babe wearing a pink pram suit for the last time, beneath a pink, west-coast-of-Ireland sky.

Other pink things: waterproofs on my wee one as he rang the bell on our washing line; pink wool to mend his moss-green leggings after a tricky week of pre-school and sleep refusal; sweet peas; cornflowers on top of banana-blackberry-new-mama-food-train loaf.

I harvested three completely life-changing Crown Prince squash and painted my toenails silver and gold for equinox.

My friend came from Australia, and I took her to the fields right beside my house, and the joy. The joy.

October began with a wren in the house and a baby inside my womb.

I stood beneath the northern lights, in the field beside my house, the night of the day I found out, crying my heart out with gratitude. With awe. With wonder. With the complete and utter beauty of it all; every last pinprick of light.

I dipped candles with beeswax from the Burren, covered them in blue cornflowers from my garden, and put them away for the Winter Solstice. 

Full moon, cornflower dancers.

The fields were full of fog and geese, and I was sick in the mornings, and in the evenings too.

I carved GAZA in my pumpkin and begged my ancestors to guide me through.

In November I sowed seeds and mended socks. Baked cakes for tea parties for small boys, served with floral napkins and a wee green mousie candle holder.

The moon was a mourning one, and we made leaf pile homes for the creatures, and listened to The Snowman. We made lanterns, and walked with them, in community, singing of our little lights. My son asked us lots about what we were dreaming about, and the frost and the snow came back to our world. I was fiercely glad.

I celebrated six years sober by dipping candles and making stars with the women I love.

The advent fair came, and a wee wren on the window. 

And then the final month came.

Then the Christmas market, in Galway, and my heart, my heart, how this wee heart expands.

My son on a beautiful swan at the harbour. Us on a carousel horse named Mary. Him showing his papa how he could run swift as a bird up the skate ramp.

And then that drive, freezing, exquisite, to the hospital. The light above the lake unlike any light I ever have known before. My lover saying – we have no need to worry with light like this, this beautiful winter light – and then, there they were, on the screen. Our baby. So small, so perfect we wept with more than just the loss of them; we wept with the very fact of them. No heartbeat, but what a thing, what a sacred thing this here life is. We wept that they had come, and stayed as long as they had, 12 weeks of carrying this perfect wee being of light. 

I miscarried our baby the next day, at home, safe and warm and full of the most terrifying grief; the most terrifying love. Every day since that one I have been held in love, wrapped in tenderness. And I have prayed to the earth on all those days that every person who loses their baby could have this too. 

Saint Nicholas brought, three days after I lost our Gabrielle, a golden hare for our tree.

After my follow up appointment, in a small village I have never even heard of: a large hand-carved wooden hare, running through the field.

A handful of days after, when grief had become a strange, heavy thing, a wren in the house again. A wren flying into every room, refusing, refusing, refusing to leave. 

Landing on my bed, on my pillow.

Fly, wee one, I tell her. 

Fly home to the winter skies. Fly to your fields, and your hedgerows; your oak and your moss; your stars and your songs.

And when you come back, I’ll still be here, wee wren. I always will.

They were due on Summer Sostice.

Today, the winter solstice, is a wet, windy, wild one. 

We will plant snowdrops in the earth, and light the cornflower dancer candles in ceremony.

A reminder that the light returns.

But a reminder, too, that it is in the dark that all life begins.

In the womb, that place where you and me, we, came to be.

And in the soil. That place where all our grief and our love can be held; where we can be held, too.

I will say something along those lines as we remember our wee one. My son will ask if it is time for cartoons yet, as it is the weekend after all, and he does have that new Tractor Ted Harvest DVD.

And I will laugh, I will laugh through the tears, and I will be grateful, so very grateful.

And all will be good, so, very, very good. 

Imagine a life spent loving what is already good.