Most of us in Britain don’t know quite what to do with grief. You don’t hear funerals announced on local radio, as I did in the west of Ireland, or gather around the body for three days in a marae, or sacred place, as my family did in New Zealand for my uncle Chad. In the secular world of shopping centres and balloon arches, microwave dinners and text messages, we don’t really know how to respond when someone dies. Especially around their loved ones.
My advice? Lift up your skirt and show them your nethers. Like many millennial women of my acquaintance, I have become hooked on the audiobook of Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects. As I rehung damp towels flung over doors, and put the rubbish on the bin actually into the bin, I welled up at the description of the US anthropologist Margaret Mead calling a healed thigh bone the first sign of human civilisation – intimating, as it does, a time in which a weak or injured member of a species was cared for by those around it. A little later on, while wiping milk circles off the table and scrubbing toothpaste from the sink, I listened to the story of Adam’s first wife, Lilith. That’s right: the Adam from Adam and Eve. According to various ancient texts, the first man was actually divorced. He had tried to make things work with a clay-fashioned woman called Lilith; but she wanted some general semblance of equality, so was relieved of her marriage and sent off to become a baby-eating demon. Fair play to her, I thought, flushing the toilet. Fair enough.
But the chapter that got me thinking about our treatment of grief was about a small, ancient stone figurine of Baubo. I had never previously heard the myth of Baubo, but it’s a cracker. After Persephone was abducted by Hades, the king of the underworld, her mother – Demeter, the goddess of the harvest – fell into a pit of depression. So abject was her misery that the crops failed and the land became barren. Even the B&M stores, I imagine, closed. Demeter wandered on, looking for her daughter in a state of mourning, until she was approached by an old woman called, you guessed it, Baubo. At first, Baubo tried to comfort Demeter, feed her, talk to her. None of it worked. The goddess remained suffocated by her own grief – unable to perform even her most basic functions. And so, faced with such abject misery, Baubo used her last resort: she lifted her skirts and showed the goddess Demeter her vulva. Now, I’m no gynaecologist, but I have showered in a lot of single-sex changing rooms, so I can tell you that the next bit of the story is intriguing to me.
Apparently, upon staring into Baubo’s lower orbit, Demeter started to laugh. For the first time since losing her daughter, she began eating and drinking again. The sun shone, the crops returned and life on Earth was restored to something like safety. And all from the mighty power of showing your shilling.
The reason this story has hooked into my brain like a bramble is, I think, because I’m not quite sure why Demeter laughs. What does this story say about the way we consider female genitals? Are they innately funny? Shocking? Do they remind us of our mortality and snap us back into a wider perspective? Is it a sign of female solidarity? Had she drawn eyes and a nose on her belly? We’ll never know. I’ve been looking at carvings of Baubo on the internet while I’m meant to be answering my emails for about three days now, and I’m still not sure I get the joke.
In Ireland alone, there are more than 100 examples of the infamous sheela na gig – a carved figure of a naked woman pulling open her vulva to any passing stranger – on churches, cathedrals and medieval buildings. And, dare I say it, it works. When, last week, a friend got in touch about a miscarriage, I offered to get on the train to her town and perform this ancient ritual on her doorstep. It was a hugely risky joke to make when someone is in that raw, immediate flush of grief. But I’m pleased to say that she laughed. And while I haven’t booked my ticket yet, the offer is still very much open.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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