Holding Space Between Beginnings and Endings: A Closing of the Bones Ceremony After Pregnancy Loss

Today reminded me that birth and death are not opposites.

They are not two ends of a straight line.
They are mirrors.
Reflections.
Sacred transitions that move us from one form to the next.

As I walk the path of becoming both a birth and death doula, I am learning that some of the most powerful moments happen in the in between. In the liminal space. In the space where a mother still carries the energy of life in her womb, even when the body has released it. Where grief and reverence meet, and nothing makes sense, but everything is still sacred.

Today was one of those days.

I had the honor of holding space alongside my godsister during a Closing of the Bones ceremony for a mother who experienced a pregnancy loss. We wrapped her body in warmth, prayer, and stillness. We honored her womb, her hips, her breath. We held her in the way all mothers should be held after loss.

The Closing of the Bones is more than ritual.
It’s repair.
It’s remembering.
It’s the body being reminded that it is still whole even after something it held is no longer there.

This ceremony, rooted in ancestral wisdom, is a way to say: You are not broken. You are not empty. You are still sacred.

My godsister, who has guided many through this work, invited me to assist. And during the ceremony, she gifted me my very first rebozo. It wasn’t just a cloth... it felt like a key. A passing of wisdom. A moment that quietly said, You’re ready.

But it was what happened after the ceremony that truly cracked my spirit open.

Once the final wrap was untied, and the silence came back in, we asked the mother if she wanted to share anything. She sat for a while, and then said softly
"I just don’t understand why my baby left me."

And the room felt even more quiet after that.

Her words held weight.
The kind of weight that wraps around your ribs and makes you hold your breath.
The kind of weight that doesn’t need fixing... just holding.

But I knew the truth.
Her baby hadn’t left her.
Because I had seen her.

Not metaphorically.
Not as a fleeting feeling or intuition.
I saw her.
Her spirit.
A soft energy radiant and present.
She was there, in the room with us.
Watching. Resting. Still connected to her mother.

And in that moment I was reminded that death is not an end.

It is an expansion.

It is the spirit stretching beyond form.
It is the shedding of the body’s limits and the stepping into something more.
Her baby had not disappeared. she had become more.

More than a heartbeat.
More than a body.
She had expanded into presence. Into light.
Into the kind of love that doesn’t have to be touched to be felt.

I don’t say these things lightly.
I’m not here to spiritualize grief or tie it up with pretty words.
Grief is still grief.
Loss is still loss.
But there’s a truth I’ve come to hold, and today confirmed it again:

Spirit doesn’t leave. It transforms.

We are taught that once the body goes, so does the being.
But I have seen enough now to know that’s not true.

That child’s spirit was in the room with us.
She was part of the ceremony.
She stayed close while we wrapped her mother’s hips and whispered to the womb.
She was part of the healing.
Part of the expansion.

And perhaps part of the reason her mother even had the strength to show up that day.

Being a doula on either side of the veil, is not about having all the answers.
It’s not about fixing grief or even easing it.
Sometimes it’s simply about saying: I see you.
To the living and the spirit alike.

It’s about holding space for questions like: Why did they leave me?
And being able to respond, gently, with: They didn’t.

They became wind.
They became light.
They became a whisper that never really leaves the room.

This work is tender. It’s raw.
It invites me to trust the unseen just as much as the seen.
And it’s in these moments... in these sacred in betweens... that I feel most aligned with why I’m here.

To witness.
To listen.

To walk with others through both their openings and their closings.
And to remember that every ending is just a shift in form.

Because love doesn’t die.
And neither does spirit.
It expands.