Celebrant Training: Weddings and Namings

Today’s the one-year anniversary since my beautiful mother slipped from this earthly life. A year that feels like a day while also feeling like a hundred years have passed. How is that? What delusion does grief spin? I’ve just been on a video call with two of my brothers, and shared the disbelief that a whole year has passed by with such speed.

If you like, you can read about my mother’s life here:
https://veronikarobinson.com/memories-of-my-magnificent-mum/

This photo is from the last time mum came to England and stayed with us for a few months. I keep it on my fridge. And when I think that beautiful woman is now ‘dust’, it shocks me every single time.

Grief steals many things. Most of them are quite obvious, but the one we don’t talk about is the poaching of time. I’m in a time warp, and more conscious of my own mortality than I’ve ever been. Time is slipping away. With my 60th birthday next year, already I’m thinking ‘why bother’ about so many things from the mundane ‘necessary’ dental work to life-enhancing dreams. What’s the point, I wonder. I’ll be dead soon enough anyway. I feel as if I’m already slipping away from this life.

Mum with me on my wedding day

Not everyone loves their mother or holds her in such high regard as I do mine, I know that. Not everyone whose mother has died will relate to what I’m sharing. What I do know, though, and what is true for me, is that even a year later this grief feels so hard. When I walk by my mother’s photos, it stops me. That beautiful smile. My mama. The woman who held me, bathed me, dressed me, played games with me, made (and still makes) me laugh with her sense of mischief. The woman who inspired me like no other. And then I think of the reality: her physical body, the one that loved me so much, is nothing more than cremains (cremated remains). How it that possible? And with that question lurks the one that plays on my mind every single day now. What is the point of anything?

I often think of my mother’s life, and all her joys and sorrows, creativity and obstacles, loves and losses. All the hard work, all the years raising eight children, all the… And now she’s gone. I know this applies to every human who’s ever come to this Earth, but this high-definition imagery of my mother living her life, and then gone, just ‘gets’ me in a way nothing else in my life ever has. I grew in her womb. I was one with her. If she’s ‘gone’, then where and who am I?

Mum outside the little hut she built on Mt. Arthur in Tasmania.

Everything I’ve believed in for so long, different spiritual ‘ideas’ and practices, are now almost meaningless. I beg the Universe to answer me: do I have free will or am I just a puppet on a string? I don’t want to be a puppet on a string, I yell. I’m not your toy! Of course, I don’t know the answer. What I do know, is that I’m questioning things that have long been my mainstay, my inner truth. Sometimes I look at all the books on my shelves, those portals into knowledge and wisdom, that I’ve valued for deep esoteric teachings and as each day passes, I’m tempted to burn everything. Nothing gives me any answer as to human suffering. Mine or that of other people.

With my mum when I was about 21.

The first time I ever saw my mother cry was when I was about ten, and she’d found out her mother had died. My grandmother lived in Germany, and I never had the privilege of meeting her though I loved to write and receive letters from her. But those tears my mother shed? I only wish I could have held her in the way I’ve needed holding. The grief she’ll have felt, not to mention regret at living overseas far away from her for a couple of decades, will have been unbearable. And I’ve no doubt that she, like me, will have also felt grief for the losses in her mother’s life.

My mother’s mother

The mother-daughter bond (for better or for worse) is unlike any other relationship. Sometimes daughters think that difficult relationships with mothers are better served by estrangement. This is not true, and death will wallop just as hard, if not harder, than for those whose relationship was less complicated.

My mother’s eight children, in age order. Left to right: Wolf, Heidi, Horst, Veronika, Ramona, Cam, Rene and Albert reunited for our father’s funeral.

The death of a loved one changes us. I mean, it has to, right? Otherwise, what’s the point of going through that emotional torture? Perhaps my torture has been amplified by the nature of the work I do as a funeral celebrant whereby I walk alongside people in their grief. The weeks leading up to and after my mother’s death were unlike anything I’d experienced before as a funeral celebrant (even though I’ve had extremely difficult funerals, such as child funerals and officiating my best friend’s cremation service and later, her memorial). What made them so hard was that each time I said the words of committal for someone’s mother, or read a tribute that said “I love you Mum. You’re my best friend,” or had to listen to music with the lyrics “You gave me my name and the colour of my eyes,”, I would just die inside. My mourners had no idea what was happening in my private life. The day my Mum died, I had to work. Several months earlier, I’d organised to host and facilitate a retreat for funeral celebrants on creating beautiful bereavement ceremonies. The irony! There was no calling it off. Not only had I been officiating funerals all the way up to my mother’s death, I then had four days of intense focus on teaching about grief. And then straight back to funeral work. I don’t share this for pity (that never helped anyone anyway), but because the reality is this year has challenged me on many levels, personally and professionally.

My role as a funeral celebrant has never felt so difficult as it has in this last year.

Maybe I’ve just not had enough space to step into ‘grief-free’ happy spaces for long enough to enable some recalibration. Apart from my mother’s death last year, the only other thing I remember with any clarity was a week away in the Scottish Highlands walking the Great Glen Way with my friend Angela. When I replay some of the videos we made, it makes me smile to see how much laughter we shared. I yearn for my life to be filled with that sort of belly-aching laughter and joy all the time. Everything else about 2025 is a blank. This past year has been like walking through the thickest fog I’ve ever known. What are you meant to do in fog? The high beam doesn’t work. The low beam doesn’t work. How am I supposed to see my way forward? Despite my spiritual beliefs, this grief has been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. There are still so many moments where I see a lovely card somewhere and think “Oh, I’ll get that for mum.” And then that realisation a few seconds later… Or when her birthday and Christmas came around, and ‘reminder’ emails from the florist I used to use to send her flowers land in my inbox asking me if I’d like to order a bouquet. A horrible reminder that I’ll never, ever, ever, ever again have the pleasure and privilege of brightening her day with flowers. That hurts.

Me and my mum

I’ve known grief a number of times now, but the most significant ones have been those of my parents and best friend Pam. This coming Christmas Day will mark ten years since Pam chose to end her life. At no level of my being is it possible to believe that a decade has gone by. I’m past that stage of thinking “I must tell Pam…” but I do have times where I see someone in the street who maybe had the same hair cut or dress style, and I think “Oh, there’s Pam!” Those moments are akin to being hit by a truck. I gather myself before the tears start. And then there are the funerals I officiate where they have one of the pieces of music we had at her funeral. I walk up the aisle of the crematorium just wanting to curl into foetal position.

Next month, on the equinox, it will be fourteen years since my father was killed in a car crash in Australia. My father’s death has integrated a bit more, finally, but I can still have tears turn up from nowhere. That he died aged 77, the age my husband is now, nags at me.

For the uninitiated into grief, anticipatory grief can be harder than when we experience a sudden death. Yes, sure, we get a chance to say goodbye but we’re also grieving twice. Before and after. While we’re waiting around for them to die, we’re grieving for tomorrow. The tomorrows where they won’t be there. And even when you’re expecting it, somehow nothing prepares you for the moment. The moment when… For me, just knowing my mum was still alive, her heart beating strong as an ox, even when deep in coma, right to the last beat somehow lulled me into a sense of hope. Where there’s life there’s hope, right? I was wrong. Despite the ridiculous amount of crying I’d done in the previous two months, when my brother phoned me during the night, UK time, to say she’d died, it hit me hard. She’s gone.

Hopefully she’s dancing with my father again

I’ve spoken sternly to the Universe and have made it quite clear that I’m in no shape to receive any more grief, thanks. And yet, I look at my family (I’m one of eight children) and friends and think “fuck, unless I go first, I’ll be saying goodbye to you too”. With that, I’m flicking pesky tears off my cheeks. “No,” my heart says. “Just NO!” I think of their beautiful faces and loving hearts, and I just can’t imagine them not being here in that form anymore. And yet, despite that, I know that death is a change of form. Nothing ever really dies. But grief doesn’t want me to know that. Grief says “How many ways can I pull at that heart of yours or bring up memories you’d long forgotten?”

I realise that it might seem I’m indulging and wallowing in self pity. Maybe I am. Or maybe it’s because, dear reader, that we live in a grief-illiterate culture and people just want the bereaved to crawl under a rock and shut the fuck up so that they don’t darken anyone else’s day. That’s how it feels. I know that, apart from work, I’ve become even more of a hermit than ever before. Life feels kinder that way. There’s no risk of someone saying something which stings, like “I don’t need to offer you condolences because of your strong spiritual beliefs.” Or, “Are you over your mother’s death yet?” I WILL NEVER BE OVER MY MOTHER’S DEATH! And, as I say that, I’m also happy that she is out there, as stardust, at one with the Universe. She’s exactly where she wanted to be: in her light body.

The children’s book my mother wrote and illustrated.

Grief the gift-giver
Perhaps if you don’t know me well or at all, it might be hard to believe that I am, by nature, an optimist and grateful about my life, even though I’ve felt like a shadow of my former self this past year. What hasn’t changed is the way I start each day where I give thanks for my beautiful life. I’m grateful that practice hasn’t changed. When I take myself off for walks in the woods, I give thanks that I live in such a beautiful part of the world and have a working life that affords me freedom to walk in between pockets of writing time. This is one of my liminal spaces. Perhaps grief, too, is a liminal space and that I will emerge. I wonder who that person will be because she certainly won’t be the one who entered.

No matter what Life brings our way, everything has to have an upside or positive learning that can be taken from it, otherwise, what is the point of any of this?

Grief has brought gifts. Strange, but true. I’ve always been grateful for my upbringing even if I wasn’t always grateful for my parents at certain times. Truth is, when we’re kids, our parents can be annoying or authoritative. We become teens and they’re downright embarrassing. We become adults and think we know more than them and see their flaws as if they’re emblazoned on their forehead.

And.
Then.
They.
DIE.

And we become an orphan. I’m not only speaking for myself, now, but all the mourners I’ve worked with of various ages who are hit hard by this reality. Even at 70, it’s like the Universe just pulled the rug out from under them. The idea, the reality, that our parents are gone is inconceivable.

We always hope our own children will understand the fragility of life and that their parents won’t always be around. That maybe, just being that bit kinder wouldn’t hurt them. That accepting their parents are human, is part of growing up. Because all those things we bitch about in relation to our parents, become utterly meaningless when we can no longer phone them and hear their voices.

Tucked into an alcove in my bedroom are photos of my mum, in the prime of her life, sitting on the swing in our garden and smiling; and my dad, as a young man, playing his piano accordion. No matter how many times I walk into my bedroom during the day or night, I pause at that altar and say ‘thank you’. I blow them kisses and say “Thank you for giving me the most incredible childhood. Thank you for the sacrifices you made. Thank you for modelling creativity, strength, resilience and adaptability. Thank you for being my parents.”

I wish I hadn’t needed grief to reach this level of gratitude.

My mother passed away at the New Moon in Pisces, releasing her last breath at 11.11a.m. on February 28th 2025 in Queensland, Australia, with her first-born child by her side. There was a lovely planetary line up.

This photo of the sky was taken on the day my Mum died by my brother Cam. Each time I look at it I can see my mother skipping up those planets, like a ladder to eternal bliss. Perfect.

I’m grateful that today there’s also a rare planetary line up. The timing is perfect.

I grieve that I wasn’t with her in those last months and years. I am grateful, however, for having known my mother’s love. A love like no other and completely irreplaceable.