During the year she spent in a Singapore prison, ArunDitha lived through her first encounter with dying. What came after was a renewal and the emergence of a new person, a journey she chronicles through a series of pivotal moments, seven years apart. Originally published by Ethos Books in the anthology Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore, “The Seven-Year Cycle” charts ArunDitha’s evolution from using avoidance to deal with loss toward relinquishing her resistance to it. At the heart of this piece is the writer’s turn inward, a yearning to peel back the accrued layers of a busy life and examine what lives inside her core. There, she finds more questions than answers about how to live cyclically, and offers her writing as an invitation to the reader to consider their relationship to mourning and death.

— Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights

Iam folded upon a cold concrete floor, my back against the wall. A few doors down, an inmate is wailing. The warden tells her to be quiet. On the other side of the bars, crickets scrape themselves into orchestral song, and a car drives by. I wonder if those people know how lucky they are to be free.

This is my introduction to dying. It is a good place to die — in a Changi Women’s Prison cell. I am nineteen years old and aging quickly. Everything is clear under the hard fluorescent lights, and all the pieces feel like they are slotting into place. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes? This is what they’re talking about.

When it comes to living through death, I am an expert. This is not boastful, since nobody really wants to die. The mystics say that the fear of death lives the longest, even until death itself. I think they’re onto something. Every time I die, there is that familiar sensation of pushing against myself in a battle to stay alive.

My being is composed of many parts. The biggest one is the part that knows nothing else matters except this moment, and that being stuck in the past is holding me back. The smaller parts remember everything: what was said and the exact inflection used, the way light hit the bodies of everyone involved, how my heart cramped or my throat opened. Those smaller parts are stubborn. They want to stay snuggled up within my corners so that I never forget. They want to protect me from experiencing pain again. Every time I die, one of my smaller parts dissolves to become the biggest part, the way a drop in the sea becomes part of a wave, and many waves become an entire ocean. We are all waves in a greater ocean.

Sitting on the floor of that prison cell, I felt my psyche zoom in and out of my body. I jumped from one life event to the next with complete disorganization, as if the marbles of my mind were bouncing across time and space. I remembered the moment a year before when I said something at dinner that made my friends skip a beat, laugh strangely, then continue their heightened discussion about the uselessness of the literary greats. I recalled the same feeling when walking to a party with my friend Rich. And again when speaking in front of my whole BA acting class. It was as if I had thrown a ball that had stopped falling midair.

The wires in my brain were rewriting themselves into an improved formation. With incredible pellucidity, I saw that in all those situations, I had intended to elicit a specific response, to paint myself in a certain hue, but my words could not land anywhere. Nobody wanted to catch them because my manipulation was too transparent.

Once I am seen, I cannot be unseen. Once I am known, I cannot be unknown.

When a part of my psyche shows itself in all its distorted glory, I cannot let it live. It has appeared so that I can set it free from the constraints of my body. It’s not violent — I always kill it with kindness, slit its throat and place it gently on the earth to bleed out as I sing a sweet lullaby. But still, I must watch it as it dies.

When I came out of my twelve-month stint in Singapore’s prison system, I thought that I had it completely figured out, that all the answers were available to me. This is a common misconception about the road to self-actualization (as described by Maslow) — we always think we are further ahead than we actually are. In my case, humility was also difficult to cultivate after a year of being starved of praise. In order to continue to persevere, a belief had to create itself: that my punishment had been for the purpose of turning me into a new, improved, walking perfection. I was twenty and reformed.

We are curled up on either side of her in the hospice bed, sobbing in anticipation. Her breath rattles softly; her eyes are open and unseeing; her mouth is gently gaping. She hasn’t moved in weeks, but this is the stillness close to death. Each intake of air is a delicate shudder, an instrument slowing into silence.

The nurse comes into the room to check her vitals. “Very soon,” I hear in lightly accented English. The beeps are slow and irregular. Her skin is cold. My sister and I do not stop crying; we have been crying for days. In this moment, we are in her womb for the final time, safe and held before a painful rebirth. Time moves slowly and in flashes, dreamlike. She takes two deep breaths, then a final gasp, as if she is about to shout something profound. But there is no sound, only silence.

Before I understood that dying was natural, I was painfully resistant to it. Death seemed to be a finite event, with no purpose but the suffering of loss. The emptiness was physical, like I had been scraped out, leaving a gaping space where nothing could enter. I tried to fill it with food, with sex, with parties, but my void had too strong a force field. On the dance floor, my body shook like it belonged to a woman possessed, seeking to exorcize herself from darkness. At home, the food I ate was heavy and comforting, in excess. Then I would spend hours at the gym to manage my guilt. At the time of her passing, I had a boyfriend of a few years who loved me dearly, but I soon told him that I needed freedom to roam untethered. The truth is that all precious relationships seemed to end in the black hole of loss, and I did not want to invest energy in any more death.

Three months after my mother died, my aunt came to pick me up from Brisbane Airport. I was starting a new chapter. No longer would there be familiar streets where my memories were waiting. I would be liberated from the reminders.

When a mother dies, the cot breaks open to release a red dragonfly.

Seven years later, when I lived in New Zealand, my mother came back to me on two occasions. The first time, I was in a plant medicine ceremony with my friend Marita, who was trained traditionally as a shaman in Peru. As the medicine began to take effect, I saw my mother arrive in a glowing white gown, with her hair in the same single braid she wore in my childhood. I felt her physical presence, and a waterfall of tears I could not contain gushed forth. My whole body remembered how safe I used to feel around her. My spine hummed with comfort, knowing that I was protected and secure. She spoke into my inner ears: “You can create it for yourself now, daughter. This safety is yours. You are your own mother now, and you will be a mother one day.”

The next time my mother came to me was one month later, as I was lying on the floor under a large marquee with other spirit seekers. I was at a breathwork workshop held on my friend’s rural property in Waimate. I could hear the songs of native birds and people-chatter outside the marquee. Everything was safe and warm, and then without warning, my mother was in my inner vision.

Between deep breaths I was transported to the moment of her death, but instead of being nestled against the left side of her body as I had been when she died, I was inside her head. When she went into cardiac arrest, I heard the final gasp and traveled out of the crown of her head, ascending far into the cosmos, where a giant ball of light hovered above us. As we drew closer, I saw that it was composed of many swishes of light, spiraling within the sphere. Then we expanded to become the whole sphere, swirling and whirling with the other spiritual beings, in flow.

It felt like returning home.

With that thought, we compressed into a tiny point of light that grew into a droplet. The droplet, heavy with consciousness, fell from that great cosmic height, right through the top of my head. As ripples of rainbow color flooded my entire body, I felt my mother say: “I am with you, I am you. Goodbye.” Like an angel, she floated away into the bright blue sky.

I knew then that I could ask for help anytime, and that she wanted to remind me she was always there within me; there had never been any separation between us, except what I had created from the pain of grief.

It is warm and safe here, and everything is suffused with red-and-pink light. I hear gurgles and splashes. All my surroundings are moving, but it feels so peaceful. Each shift is swaying me gently in the wind. An endless quiet where nothing seems to happen and I am suspended in bliss. Of course, the emotions wash over me. I feel when this womb is happy. I feel when this womb is sad. I know her fear, her anger. It is familiar — I know her as I know myself; there is no ending or beginning.

Unfamiliar. Smell. Unfamiliar. Sight. Shapes. Loud. Sound. Loud. Sound. Pain. Pain. Cannt. Brea. Pain. CantBre. Pain. Canttt. Breeee.

At first, birth was uncomfortable. They operated on me for fourteen hours after my debut into the world, stitching up the hernia in my diaphragm and leaving me with a scar slashed across my chest. When I was young, I wanted to hide my disfiguration, my abnormality. While all the other girls wore bikinis, I kept my chest hidden from view. Now I do not hide anymore. I dance naked with my sisters under the sunlight, grateful for everything that has transpired and is to come.

Over the course of this life, I have heard the myth again and again that our cells are completely renewed after seven years. This means that every seven years, we are reborn. Scientists have said that this is untrue, but still, I am a completely different person from seven years ago and from seven years before that.

The self-inquiry that I have conducted over the course of the last number of years has brought me back to my birth repeatedly. In a powerful online breathwork session with my friend Alex, who lives in Bali, I remembered the pain of the incubation period after surgery, and the feelings of isolation and separation from my mother, who had offered such safety within her womb.

In some spiritual lineages, like Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism, memory is also seen as something held outside the body — within the unified field, or the “cloud.” From this great library of the universe, also called the Akashic Record, or Akasha in Sanskrit, one can retrieve all the information of what has occurred, is occurring, or might occur in the future.

The great cosmic cloud has always held these memories for me when I needed to retrieve them. My consciousness has traveled far and wide to discover the edges of itself. It continues to find uncharted waters and write new versions of my story so that I can tell it.

My first birth into this world was painful and difficult, but these days, coming back to life seems to only get easier. The initial breaths are sweet vapor, fuel for the magic of change. Being alive in each moment is an adventure, and the cycle of life and death makes a perfect circle. And if it ever gets a little rough, I remember the words of the woman who made me flesh and blood, the trust on her face as she told me: “You are your own mother now.”

Then I breathe through the pressure with gratitude and grace, to birth myself anew.

Excerpted from “The Seven-Year Cycle,” written by ArunDitha. Originally published in 2021 by Ethos Books, which describes itself as “an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry [that] nurture[s] the growing literary community in Singapore and throughout the region.”