Mermaidism: The Religion I Created to Save Myself
Tradition offers a map, but the prescribed route through grief's terrain after my son's death fell short. So I made my own.
I was baptized in a pool in Northern California.
Not literally — I'm Jewish, from New Jersey, and baptism is not in my spiritual wheelhouse. Yet there I was, in the middle of a ceremony, submerged in water, agreeing to die to be reborn — opening my heart to a shift I couldn't yet name.
It was exhilarating, like breaking out of a too-tight shell, discovering I could move through currents I once found impassable. It was also something I would have, not long ago, dismissed as absurd. Even cultlike.
But losing a child changes you.
It shatters everything — what you know, believe and expect. Tradition offers a map, but the prescribed route through grief's raw terrain fell short. So I made my own.
I call it Mermaidism.
The Water That Holds Me
I've always belonged in water.
As a child, I was drawn to the deep end, where light fractures into ribbons and the noise of the world above fades away. I loved the weightlessness, how my body moved beyond gravity's rules. I played with breath, curious how long I could stay before instinct pulled me back.
As a child, I was drawn to the deep end, where light fractures into ribbons and the noise of the world above fades away.
Swimming has buoyed me through breakups, career pivots, three pregnancies. During the pandemic, the lane waiting for me was often the only thing that got me out of bed.
Back then, I still considered water a refuge, not a ritual. That changed the night I was baptized.
I came to unfamiliar spiritual practices the way many heartbroken people do — grasping for something that made sense. Traditional Jewish mourning rituals — the mourner's prayer, sitting shiva, planting trees in Ravi's name — were powerful gestures of remembrance and witness. They gave me structure but didn't reach the deepest ache.
That's when Tina reached out.
She's the friend who always finds the path before I do. Years ago, she left the East Coast for California in search of something deeper, more real. By the time my world crumbled, she had already rebuilt hers, centered around the Toltec Medicine Wheel of Transformation, rooted in Native American and Mesoamerican teachings about life, death and rebirth.
When she invited me onto this path, offering a way to move through sorrow toward something freer, I said yes. A leap of faith had never felt so literal.
That's how I ended up in Sonoma County, the only non-local in a year-long shamanic training — what they call a closed container: a sacred circle.
By the time of my baptism, I had already walked through fire. I had sat in a sweat lodge, stripped by heat and emotion. I had practiced breath work so intense it slipped past the gatekeeping brain, unsealing grief I'd hidden from myself for survival.
I felt Ravi, my sweet, forever-17-year-old son. He was in the presence of those who held me. And I knew something had shifted.
So when my teachers, standing in the pool, told me to fall backward into the water, I didn't hesitate. I was ready.
For a moment, I was weightless, free-falling. Then hands caught me, held me, carried me. I let go.
When I opened my eyes, the night sky stretched above — vast, luminous, infinite. The water shimmered with reflected starlight. I felt Ravi, my sweet, forever-17-year-old son. He was in the presence of those who held me. And I knew something had shifted.
April 3, 2021 — the day the accident took my oldest son from this world and left the rest of us behind with the shattered remains. The details of those fatal minutes are seared into my memory. But now, so is this: his presence in the water. His voice — so Ravi — telling me he had been here all along. Only now, I was ready to listen.
That night, I realized this wasn't just swimming anymore. And it wasn't just grief.
It was devotion. A ritual. A practice. A faith I didn't inherit — I created.
A New Way to Pray
I used to count laps, push for endurance and chase progress. Not anymore. Now, my swims are a prayer.
They begin gently like the Sabbath's opening songs, a soft transition into holiness. My mind quiets. My body falls into a rhythm. Movements turn fluid, remembering something ancient.
I ease in with freestyle, flipping at the wall and slicing back through the lane. At the shallow end, I pause to stretch and curl inward, letting the water lift what usually feels heavy.
I used to count laps, push for endurance and chase progress. Not anymore. Now, my swims are a prayer.
When I'm ready to go deep — the heart of the prayer — I dive to the nine-foot bottom, touch the pool floor and linger longer than my mind says I should. The fear comes — tight lungs, rising urgency —but I stay. I wait until it breaks, until something shifts inside.
Then instinct takes over. I surrender to the slow ascent. The shimmering line between water and air draws closer — a silver divide.
Breaking the surface is always a jolt. The first inhale sears; I let myself sink, then rise again as if lifted. The second breath — the real one — feels like arrival. In the water, time dissolves. I could do this for hours.
This is how I know Mermaidism is real: the water is where I remember who I am and where I hear them. Not voices or visions — just something real.
Ravi is there. God, too. Or something vast and wiser than me. Messages arrive as if placed in my mind, not pulled from it. I've stopped questioning. I capture what I can.
At the shallow end, I often reach for my phone mid-swim to whisper a voice memo. If I wait — poof — the fleeting thoughts are gone. Later, when I transcribe it, the pain has moved from my body. It has spoken.
There was a time I might've felt ridiculous doing this. Not anymore. I've left too many truths at the bottom of the pool already.
The Call of the Deep
I hesitated to name it at first. A made-up religion? A grieving mother in midlife deciding she needs to be reborn?
But a quieter voice inside me whispers: 'Yes. And why not?'
Isn't that what religion is for — to help us live with what we can't control? To make meaning from loss, change, and all we aren't meant to understand?
My roots are in Judaism, and that faith will always ground me. But my grief and my curiosity led me elsewhere, too. I've explored other traditions, seeking something to hold my sorrow. But no packaged deal has yet offered me a way to live with the ache of losing my firstborn son. None tell me what to do with this kind of not knowing.
But in that search, I noticed what had always been called to me — symbols that lived in my imagination long before I gave them meaning.
Mermaids have always represented the in-between — the mystical feminine, unbound by land or sea. These mythical beings live in the deep, in the mystery. Mermaids don't resist the currents; they surrender to the unknown. There's something subversive in that. Something freeing. Something I needed.
Still, I forget.
Life gets noisy. I tell myself I'm too busy to swim, that my mermaid ritual can't possibly be as meaningful as I remember.
Yet every time I return, I'm surprised by how right it feels, how the water has waited unchanged, ready to take me back in.
Maybe it's a religion. Maybe it's just where I feel most like myself.
Either way, the water always calls me back.
