I started a page called Cocoon Baby Loss in 2023 as a personal instagram account. I only posted a couple of times and now feel good about picking it up again. This time having supported other bereaved parents through workshops, care packages and grief circles throughout 2024. Soon, Yewande 103 will be rolling Cocoon out as a new initiative across arts and healthcare spaces.
As part of this, the Cocoon blog will be a place for me to share - from an embodied perspective - all the ways my work as an artist and parent have changed because of my son Oscar. I hope it will be a mixture of reflections and current thoughts to acknowledge the impact that baby loss has on so many of us. I chose 'cocoon' as a site of holding and safety. It is also a place of hidden loss and transformation. I hope the name can encapsulate the desire to be held while we fall apart and then reform our lives around the loss of a baby. I also hope it can gently amplify experiences; the way a song echos in a cave.
And so to the writing.
I think to myself, ‘How about with this new blog I write one idea at a time?’ Then, I’m instantly struck by the impossibility of that when so many things happen concurrently. I am forever feeling the grief-love timelines that weave around bereaved parents.
The squashing in the order of things as a baby dies and then is born. Compressed, crumpled timelines coupled with the heart-space expansion of loving someone so very much. Lives irrevocably changed. Bodily expertise gained which sits - as gentle tender witness to the trauma too. As time has moved on, there is a surreal solace in the irreparable. As in, I’m not really meant to move past the loss of you. Your cells are in me. You are with me as I embrace my life. I am above and you are below.
Jack Halberstam writes on ‘unimaginable’ positions being calls to ‘reorient hope’. Everything is easier with acknowledgement. A dropping in rather than a pushing away (running away?) from. So I remind myself once more that it is ok to drop into the wild unknowns of how to process loss. Remind myself that actually, in that moment of labour, my body had already redrawn so many maps and materialised a compass for the rest of me to ‘reorient’. The haze of acute grief required urgent (re)forming of systems outside of my reality up to that point. My body knew what to do. And across time, my heart knew which symbols and metaphors could language my life anew; willow trees, whales, water.
In this current season, as your due date anniversary approaches - you would be three years old - I find myself frightened that those closest to me have forgotten you and so it’s interesting that as I write, I am feeling the power of our connection. That in my felt-level experience, you are indelible. And that this knowledge is what will keep folding into my life.
Body. Breath. Voice. Space.
Follow @cocoonbabyloss to join the journey.
Warmly and with heart,
Alexandrina
Founder & Creative Director, Yewande 103
Thank you to Dr. Tia-Monique Uzor for sharing Jack Halberstam's essay 'The Wild Beyond' in The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney during the Digital Black Dance Ecologies Research Lab at Birmingham Open Media, January 2025.
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