Aga Kozak: Did you want to disappear? To die?
Katarzyna Jackowska-Enemuo*: I just love life very much, so I didn’t have such thoughts, but I know it's possible - because grief affects everyone differently.
But there are moments when I think to myself, "Jesus, this is so difficult! Too difficult for me!" There are also thoughts like, "I would rather not exist." Not "not live," but not exist.
Because then you wouldn't feel?
Exactly.
You probably experienced something that is every parent's greatest fear. You lost a child. Almost from one day to the next.
Almost, because in the bigger picture - it was two weeks. Although for the first week, no one knew how serious it was… Two and a half years ago, we were coming back from a long, intense vacation, and my daughter, Naomi, wasn’t feeling well. I knew that as soon as we got back to Warsaw, we would have to repeat all the tests because when we did them earlier, the doctors kept saying it was "just a growth phase"…
That is - what?
Increased fatigue and chest pain. And after returning from vacation, Naomi was just very tired. We planned to start hospital visits as soon as I got back from a five-day work trip to Wrocław, where we were preparing a play for a festival. Since I'm a single mom - Józek, my son, and daughter stayed with a friend of mine. And it turned out that my daughter had a fever, which persisted, even though my kids usually get over fevers in two days. So yes, it was worrying, but I had to stay in Wrocław due to various contractual penalties.
You know, it’s terrible - later you think to yourself, of course, it was only so many thousand zlotys, that it didn’t matter, that I could have spent more time with my child - but that's in hindsight because you don’t know what will happen… At that moment, death doesn't come to mind.
You arranged tests remotely. The doctor said it looked like rotavirus.
Then she said it might be a virus that attacked the pericardium… I came back from work and took Naomi for tests, but she was so weak that we immediately went to the ER after them. They determined it was just a very weak child with rotavirus.
For the next three days, they kept taking her blood, but still, no one could figure out what was wrong with her. And when someone finally suggested it might be pulmonary hypertension, they rushed us in an ambulance with oxygen to the pediatric cardiology unit.
Naomi was still being diagnosed for three days there… This disease affects two people per million - doctors usually don’t stand a chance against it; they can't recognize it quickly.
…On the same day that the head doctor made the final diagnosis, Naomi died. 7 hours and 19 minutes after the diagnosis, my child was gone.
And I wasn’t with her at that moment because I had gone home to wash up. My father was there, and Naomi died in his arms. I arrived during the resuscitation. Now I'm going to cry. Because sometimes I can talk about it calmly, but sometimes I can't. For a long time, I couldn’t speak at all - I mean, I could, but I didn’t know how. However, what happened after Naomi's death was so beautiful - both the funeral and the wake - that it helped me find my voice. Though everyone deals with it differently - for example, my son wasn’t helped at all, he wanted to go through it in his own way, quietly.
You had a different need.
I needed to take care of everything to the end.
I didn’t really need a community - but the community came together on its own.
I posted on social media that Naomi had died, so that no one would accidentally call and ask "how she’s doing," because I wouldn’t have been able to bear it, and also because so many people loved her. The next morning, people were already at my house - and over the following days, they came from all over the world. They brought food, toilet paper, they cleaned. Some left, others arrived: reminiscing, eating, drinking, playing, singing, washing dishes.
Before it happened, I thought I wanted to hide in the darkest hole, but people didn’t let me.
I realized that their presence had some meaning, that maybe the world was wiser than I was - so I sat with them, just rocking back and forth in despair and feeling like I was high. As soon as I could, I started taking care of the funeral preparations - which was completely new to me because I had very little experience with death; I had been to very few funerals, I even missed those of my grandparents.
You told me that the funeral was the last thing you could do the way Naomi would have wanted it.
I don’t know if it was exactly how she would have wanted it.
But since I couldn’t keep her… I wanted to send her off to the cosmos well.
And since we lived in many communities, families, and many people knew her, I decided to give people a chance to mourn her. Because she didn’t just die to me, she died to them too. So I asked my friends to light fires for Naomi. Fires burned practically all over the world. People cried and sang because we had spent our whole lives with people who sang. They sang and cried loudly.
Crying in corners, the shame associated with sadness, unprocessed grief - that’s the worst.
You did a lot of things the way it used to be, years ago. When people still died at home, funerals lasted several days, and death wasn’t separated from life.
Yes. For example, I washed my daughter myself after her death and before the cremation, I cut a lock of her hair, even though the nurses were afraid to give me scissors...
And immediately after her death, they let us sit with Naomi: it was amazing that she was still warm, but she wasn’t there in her body anymore. A person after death becomes like a shell, a cast-off skin.
It was no longer my child, although it still smelled like her, for example. Once the worst has happened, you reach a different level; you can calmly do things you wouldn’t have thought you could do. Since unfortunately, it was Friday, her body had to stay in the morgue for two days, waiting until Monday when they could release her to me. If I could have, I would have taken her home… We placed her body, wrapped in a shroud, in the coffin with my loved ones.
Before the cremation, you prepared her specially…
She had her shoes, makeup, her nails painted by her friend and me, just as she would have wanted. People were surprised: "Aren't you afraid?" Afraid of what? I was afraid before. I might be afraid of how I will cope with this. But the body of my child? My own child? Her urn was sanded by my ex-boyfriend, a Spanish carpenter. I painted it. After the cremation, Naomi stood on the table and people could visit her. None of what happened was really planned. I was led by instinct: I just knew that at that moment I could only do that. People helped. They joined in.
The funeral and the wake were…
...for the whole world. Anyone who wanted could speak or sing, although I had to organize it because there were so many volunteers. Difficult situations make people want and need to act.
Her ex-boyfriend played the accordion for her. The kids from the Mazurkowa Orchestra in Praga played and sang their anthem, adding posthumous verses for Naomi. Kids aged 9-10! They wrote posthumous verses! Apparently, I said something, but I don’t remember a word. And at the funeral, everyone was there, of all faiths, identities, and skin colors.
The celebrant of the farewell ceremony was a friend, the wonderful priest Wojciech Drozdowicz, the same one who buried Kora, and he promised me that he would talk about how we are light, not about dust, fear, and worms… just as I wanted. If the Catholic Church were like this priest… Because, for example, the priest in charge of the cemetery didn’t allow me to carry the urn - according to the rules, I had to put it on a cart. How insensitive! Terrible! At this funeral, several hundred people joined in their ways of praying and together they sang "Let it be" by Lennon. People threw many things into Naomi's grave - by the way, it’s a grave where my almost uncle, a child of the Warsaw Uprising, lies.
The wake was in Jazdów, in the garden.
Everything was organized by loved ones: everyone brought something, shared something. Friendly Chechens cooked food… Someone on the spot made soup. Musicians came to play - even for a little while. I just asked people to dress warmly and to bring their own cups and cutlery because Miśka - Naomi, who was the first to go fight for the Forest - would never have forgiven me for producing plastic at her event given her environmental engagement… I also asked for no cut flowers, but something that could be planted, or better yet, to plant something for her somewhere - so there are trees planted for Naomi around the world.
We danced a Vlach dance for the dead, which was strange to some people, and unbearable to others - dancing at a funeral?
I also attended a Catholic farewell, organized by believing friends - singers.
At that time, you did everything your heart dictated. And what helped you.
Nothing helped me. But I did what I needed to do.
And during that wake, I felt that my daughter had "gone." That’s what I wanted, our rituals worked - but it’s a terrible, terrible feeling.
But also wonderful when you see that everyone at the funeral is involved in something. When I noticed this, I felt that I didn’t want to just celebrate funerals, but I also wanted to be a planner - just as there are wedding planners, I want to help with funeral planning.
Because it’s very, very important that a funeral be a rite that guides both the deceased person and ourselves from one state to another. And to allow people to be involved. For example, I have huge guilt that I didn’t take care of my son - but I couldn’t… So my family and friends took care of him wonderfully. And guilt is what gives you really dark thoughts.
The funeral and the wake are communal moments, still exceptional times, almost like a holiday… And then everyday life comes.
And you’re left alone with all of it, and your mind is the biggest monster. Guilt and a sense of responsibility appear immediately, especially in our culture…
And I, after all, didn’t accept until the very last moment that Naomi might die. I was preparing for a long illness…
What I lost! How much it fueled my guilt: "What else could I have done?!" Do you know what can save us?
What?
Drilling into your head something that we try hard to avoid and something our culture tries to effectively remove from our daily lives - that REALLY at any moment we can die. And so can someone close to us.
You and I will part ways now and may never meet again. It sounds like a terrible cliché. But it’s the only way. Meanwhile, our escape from death is really enormous: we don’t keep vigil, we don’t mourn, we have no contact with the dead body. And we don’t see death as part of life, but as its opposite.
Due to the death of a mother, you’re entitled to two days off in Poland. In the new "Sex and the City," only one person cries at the funeral, and the rest consider it inappropriate.
We cut ourselves off from it, and thus don’t process it. And we harm ourselves because postponed, missed, unexperienced grief - will still come and will be more terrifying than the grief we consciously go through.
We don’t live "in the shadow of death"; we live with death every day - if we look at it this way, life takes on a different dimension. Death gives life meaning. We prefer the safe advertising world to the company of ugly death. Because death is often not pretty. Illness is not pretty. Crying is not pretty. When you cry, people worry. I’ve learned to cry. Officially.
You say, "I’m going to cry now."
"Don’t worry about me, everything is okay." And I can cry non-stop for two days. It’s unbelievable how much salty water a person has inside…
Cutting yourself off from grief, sorrow, and mourning is probably the worst thing you can do to yourself. But being with yourself is a chance to see how much difficult, dark stuff we have inside and to come to terms with it. It’s not easy. To be with yourself.
There are now people in the world who accompany you in grief: Anja Franczak, the founder of the Institute of Good Death. You.
For now, only among friends and unofficially. But Anja, yes. Such people are very much needed because people can’t accompany themselves. They are not good to themselves. They neglect their own feelings, deny what they feel. A companion is someone who doesn’t therapize you - but is with you in the way you should be with yourself at that time. I asked Anja to meet with me two years after my daughter's death. I felt so bad I couldn’t breathe. We talked for two hours, and after that time I realized that just as she was with me, I wanted to be with myself and other people.
What does that involve?
A lot of listening. A lot of silent acknowledgment "this is how it is now." A lot of awareness that everything changes: today is like this, tomorrow like that, the day after tomorrow it will be different again. And above all, a gentle, non-intrusive presence. It also seems easier for others to accompany…
…but that doesn’t mean giving advice…
…or worrying. "Don’t cry, because I’m so worried." Shielding you from experiencing grief. "Don’t worry, it will get better."
The best intentions don’t help. If you yourself are afraid of crying, fear, or death, how can you accompany someone in it?
What happened to me between Naomi's death and now - and I told you I had almost no experience with death before - is the departure of a huge number of important people in my life. I see more and more people looking for a good way to leave, to say goodbye. As an anthropologist by training, I want to restore rites of passage that have been cut from our culture. Because they have specific elements that help us deal with sadness, despair, "guide the soul to the other side," as it used to be said. The soul of the deceased and our own. Although we’ve lost old rites, we can create our own, new ones, incorporating these archaic elements. With all my experience - I want to help with that. Also in joyful moments: for example, with the expected birth of a child. Because birth and death aren’t that far apart…
Your grief - it still continues, right? Even though you published a book, you perform…
It doesn’t end. And performing, work doesn’t change that.
I believe there is no such thing as five stages of grief** - and modern psychology agrees. There are elements of grief: sometimes one, sometimes another is on top. What I’m learning is to live with death and grief.
I hate the expression "overcome with grief." Sometimes you can be overcome with sadness, but not grief because it’s the other side of the same coin that says "grief lasts a year and a day." It’s not like that. Sometimes many people don’t cry for two years and then it hits them… For me, two years later, it was so terribly heavy. I suddenly fell apart.
A friend of mine, whose husband died 10 years ago, still cries for him, even though she has a new husband and family. So it doesn’t end, but you can close it - learn to live with the loss.
Recognize it in yourself, find its place, identify what are my survival strategies: do I freeze, or do I go to a disco. See what connects me to the deceased person, find my empty places after that person - that’s invaluable. But we can’t avoid what hurts. Because grief is love, just in a gray cloak.
*Katarzyna Jackowska-Enemuo - From Pomerania, cultural anthropologist by training, mother. Writer, author of the book "Tkaczka chmur" (a fairy tale that won the "Lokomotywa" award), musician, and storyteller. She composes her own songs and music for plays. Co-founder of the band Jazgodki and the Migawki Project, with which she creates performances in two Polish languages - spoken and sign language. Author of the "Inevitable" project, which includes songs created in response to the experience of loss. She performs, plays for dancing, tells stories, and plays performances, as well as leads workshops on singing, dancing, and storytelling. Aspiring funeral planner and conductor of rites of passage.
** In fact, in the West, they are moving away from the five stages of grief still cultivated in Poland, and talking about its phases. More can be read, for example, in the book "It’s OK That You’re Not OK" by Megan Devine.
