From Fear to the Pregnant Void: My Journey to Reclaim Death’s True Story
How Patriarchy Stole the Feminine Power of Cyclical Life—And Why Reclaiming It Matters (1 of 5) - REVISED & EDITED
This is an ongoing series: Post 1 (From Fear to the Pregnant Void), Post 2 (How Patriarchy Stole Death’s Story) post 3 (A World on Fire: Grief is Praise).
No stranger to death — or what Zoomers call “un-alive”.
I sat on my aunt’s lap.
She was warm and soft, her voice carrying the same resonance as my mother’s.
She was drawing on a piece of paper in front of me, speaking words I barely understood—"reincarnation," "salvation"— words too big for my nine-year-old mind to grasp.
My mother was a few rooms away.
Yet, also not.
I sat still, listening, nodding at my aunt unsure of what the next few hours would bring. I had no real understanding of death.
All I knew was that my mother was gone.
She would never call me on the phone again.
I would never sit on her lap and smell her coffee breath as she read to me before school.
The one anchor in my world, the only thing that felt steady, safe, and real—just vanished.
Yet not.
At some point in the next hour, I gathered my courage — walked right up to the open box lined in white satin. There lay the perfect image of my mother, as if asleep.
Yet not.
She was too still.
Eerily still.
Friends and their parents came up to me, speaking in hushed tones, their faces strained with pity. I turned away from them, scanning the room for her — waiting, expecting her to sit up, to scold me for not finishing my dinner.
Yet she did not.
I glanced once more at this body that was my mother.
But was not.
Reaching out, I touched her face — porcelain, smoothed over with makeup, her lips painted just right. Just how I remembered in all my moments sitting, watching her paint her face.
A sleeping beauty.
Cold.
Hard.
Stiff.
This was not my mother.
But it was my mother.
And yet, it wasn’t.
I was too young to process what I was experiencing. Nearly forty years later, I am still not sure I ever have — grief washing over me in waves at the oddest times. Every milestone I reached without her. Every moment I watched my sons, now young men, step into lives she never got to witness.
Realizing I have outlived my mother by eight years now.
💗 Her death anniversary is February 13th, so fitting I am writing this now. 💗
The Christian’s War on Death
I understand now what my aunt was doing in that moment before my mother’s wake.
She was concerned for my soul. She did not know if my mother had been "saved" before she died. But “God Almighty!” — she could still try to save mine.
To christians, DEATH is something to be beaten.
Conquered.
Outsmarted with the right belief system.
That day, sitting on my aunt’s lap, I had no idea what she was trying to do. But the conversation lingered, shaping my search for meaning, for understanding.
For understanding death.
Fast forward nine years: I was now eighteen. My life of mother-loss, abuse and trauma hit me like a ton of bricks, leaving me with no idea of what direction was up or forward.
I decided to leave college and take some time to figure myself out.
Then my father found his way back my brother and I’s lives — only to tell us he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
I was terrified.
Terrified for myself. Terrified of death.
At the same time, I moved in with the same Evangelical aunt who had preached to me before my mother’s wake—the only person in my life who felt safe, a place to land.
I didn’t question it when her faith, church and preaching pulled me in. It all wrapped me up with a warm embrace — giving me a spritual family for my orphaned soul.
Looking back, I see what it really was: a cult.
As any good cult does, they start with a fear tactic — creating the illness then selling you the cure: The story of Jesus’ death to provide life with his blood magic.
Jesus went into the grave to beat death.
His crucifixion and three days in the grave was a cosmic battle.
His resurrection, proof that sin and death could be overcome.
And I needed that story.
It felt like a promise. A reassurance that, no matter what, I would see my mother again. My father again. That death was not the end.
I held onto that promise like a drowning soul hanging on for dear life.
However, there was fine print to this story.
Fine print no one shared.
Not until I was already fully committed to the faith, devoting my entire soul to this “god’s” laws and words.
No one told me that because my mother had taken her own life, she was outside of that salvation.
No one told me that suicide was a sin.
And when I finally learned?
Her death now felt like a betrayal.
Not by God.
By her.
God Gives Life, Only He Can Take It Away
My mother had a rare, sarcoma-type cancer. It had been in remission for a small while — but when it returned, it began to consume her body rapidly.
I would not learn until my forties — after I had left Christianity — that this type of cancer was and still is incredibly difficult to treat, let alone survive.
Yet, back then — as a christian?
All I knew was that she had chosen to die.
And I was furious.
Not at God, who had given her this disease.
Not at the people who told me, with solemn faces, that "God had used my mother" to bring me to salvation—as if she were nothing more than a pawn in some divine game, her only purpose to push me into faith.
No.
I was angry at her.
She had taken a life that was not hers to take.
As an Evangelical, I was taught that only God has the right to give and take life. That Jesus had gone to the cross to destroy the power of death — to snatch victory from the grave.
My mother had taken matters into her own hands, instead of trusting god.
I had been sold a beautiful promise, and then—just as I fully accepted it—told, "Oh, wait. Not for her."
WHAT IF DEATH IS NOT TO BE BEATEN?
I left the evangelical, right-wing version of Christianity a loooong sixteen years later.
At the time, I was living in NorCal, surrounded by hippies, trees, and spirituality that was not Christian. I ate it up, drank it in, and basked in all I could learn.
I left Christianity the weekend of Labor Day 2012.
A few weeks later, I found myself deep in the redwoods, sitting in a circle of women—women of all ages, women I did not know, yet who saw me in a way I had not been seen in over 16 years.
That weekend, I encountered something I never had before:
The divine in the feminine.
The power of women gathering together to sing, praise, and worship—not in submission, not in silence, but in the full expression of our bodies, our voices, our cycles.
I had spent nearly two decades living in a story where power, resurrection, and divinity belonged only to men.
But here, in this circle, another story began to emerge.
A story where women had once held these things, too.
A story older than the Bible.
A story about a goddess who walked willingly into Death and returned reborn.
Her name was Inanna.
Inanna, the Ancient Goddess Who Walked Into Death
Inanna, an ancient goddess predating the Bible by 1,000–2,000 years, held dominion over both Earth and the Heavens. But She wanted more.
She sought to rule the Underworld, too — not as a passive princess, but as a Queen who ruled Her own fate.
Unlike Jesus, who was sent to die, Inanna chose Her descent.
To reach the Underworld, She had to pass through seven gates,
stripping Herself of power symbols at each one — her crown, her robes, her scepter.
By the time She reached Her twin sister, Ereshkigal — the dark, grieving, bleeding aspect of Herself — She stood naked and humbled.
And then?
Ereshkigal killed Her. Hung Her on a meat hook to rot.
For three days and three nights, She remained there.
But before She left, Inanna had prepared. She had sent a servant with instructions: If She did not return, send for help.
And so, after three days, She had help to be resurrected, reborn back into Life.
She returned to the living — not as the same Inanna, but as one who had faced Death, made peace with it, and emerged reborn.
This story carrys both the echoes of a time before patriarchy fully took hold — and the demise and demotion of women under the burden of patriarchy.
Inanna was a goddess who moved with autonomy, agency, and power.
Pre-patriarchy Goddesses were seen to be the Gatekeepers of Death — something Innana takes on with Her descent into the Underworld.
Yet She was also split — Her dark self, Ereshkigal, pushed into the shadows, into the Underworld — into all things dark, mysterious, magical, unknown. Into Death. As the ideology of patriarchy was beginning to do to women themselves.
In Her story — we can clearly see the demotion of the feminine had begun.
By the time Jesus’ story was written — 1,500 years later — the Ideologoy of Patriarchy had solidified its grip and cemented its reign. WHAT IF DEATH IS NOT TO BE BEATEN? [Learn more about how Patriarchy ideology started in my YouTube series, Foundations for Deconstructing Patriarchy.]
No longer could a woman descend and rise again — according to her own inner nature, her womb wisdom.
No longer could She hold death and life within herself.
No longer was She allowed to be the Gatekeeper of Death, to share Her womb wisdom of life to death and death to life…of being reborn.
The power of resurrection was given to a man.
And death?
It became something to fear, something to defeat.
If this story feels familiar, it should. With a MAJOR difference.
Inanna’s journey to the Underworld and Jesus’ crucifixion share striking similarities:
Both are stripped of their power, mostly naked, humiliated before the world.
Both are hung—Inanna on a meat hook, Jesus on a wooden cross.
Both remain in death for three days and three nights.
Both return—resurrected, transformed.
But there is one crucial difference: Inanna’s was a Heroine’s journey.
Unlike Jesus, who was sent to die alone, Inanna chose Her descent—and She did not go without preparation.
She had foresight. She set up a Witness. Someone to call for help if She did not return.
This was not just an individual sacrifice. It was a communal act — a powerful tool for social cohesion, collaboration, and collective survival.
As I mentioned above — Inanna’s story still carries the imprint of a pre-patriarchal world. A world where death was not a solitary defeat to be conquered but a passage — one navigated together even though carried out alone.
Jesus’ story, on the other hand?
It was a hero journey. Hero’s go at their battles and chaos of life alone. To have all the victory alone. They do not typically seek the feminine traits of collaboration and cooperation, of social unity.
How do you think the world would be different if Patriarchy had not wiped out the stories like Inanna’s to frame the ideology of Death for us?
REFRAMING DEATH MATTERS
This story reframed death for me.
Not as something to fear. Not as a battle to win. But as an essential part of life’s cycle.
Christianity had taught me that death was the enemy. That it had to be conquered. That my mother had failed because she had succumbed to it.
They used Death as a fear tactic to force obedience to their ideology — which is ultimately Patriarchy’s ideology [stick with me on this substack, I will share how this happened].
But Inanna’s story — which was an even older story — showed me something else:
Death is not something to beat nor overcome.
Death is the pregnant void.
The space where all potential begins.
Without death, there is no rebirth and no life.
Without death, there is only desctruction.
Death is not the enemy. It’s the doorway.
We’ve been taught to fear it, fight it, believe that to embrace it is to lose.
But what if that’s the biggest lie of all?
I am going to leave it here for this week.
Please sit in this PREGNANT VOID of all this potentially new possiblity of what REFRAMING DEATH and the story we tell about it might mean for you. For our societ.
Next week, we’ll step even further outside of patriarchal death myths — looking at indigenous and new age wisdom to rewrite the story of what it means to grieve, to die, and to be reborn.
We’ll also look at why grief is the highest form of praise—and how the wisdom of “The Smell of Rain on Dust” by Martin Prechtel offers a balm for the soul.
From there, I will see if we are ready to wrap this series up really diving deep into the poignant lessons the Story of Death teaches a society How to Live.
Until then…sit with this Question my dear death explorer:
What if death is not an end, but an initiation?
Feel free to share yout thoughts for us all to ponder!
So many blessings,
Holli