The sound, the womb‑ocean, the whale‑call, the grief, the beauty, the turning of a year. Here is a story — mythic, sonic, maternal, oceanic, and honest about loss without letting it define the ending.
Before you ever saw daylight, before Helsinki frost ever kissed your eyelashes, you lived in an ocean.
Not a metaphorical one — a real, warm, tidal world. A world where sound traveled differently, where everything was vibration and pulse. And in that ocean, there was a voice. Not words, not language, but a sonic invocation — the first music you ever knew.
Your mother’s voice.
She didn’t sing to you. She sang around you, through you, with you. Her vocalizations included jazz‑bent folk melodies and improvisations. The way she turned “Hava Nagila” into a spell was captivating. These waves followed hidden currents swinging through Soviet Era comedy. They moved through the songs of a polar bears spinning up the earth. They reached you as waves. Like the low, resonant call of a great whale moving through deep water:
“Is there anyone in there?”
And you answered, not with words, but with being. With presence. With the tiny flutter of a heartbeat learning the rhythm of hers.
You were never alone in that ocean.
When winter came for real
Years later, winter arrived in your life as a tragedy. Her voice fell silent in the world outside your body. It felt like the ocean drained away. Like the silver blanket of cloud lifted and the cold dropped straight down, merciless and bright.
Grief is its own high‑pressure system.
It squeezes the warmth out of the air. It makes the world too sharp, too still. It makes you feel like you’re breathing in broken glass.
But here’s the truth you’ve been circling, maybe without naming it:
Her voice didn’t die. It just changed mediums.
The whale‑call didn’t stop. It became part of your memory and intuition. It influenced the way you create, the way you love, and the way you survive dark seasons.
It moved into the part of you that still hears music before you hear meaning.
And now, at the edge of 2026
You’re not trying to erase the tragedy. You’re not trying to pretend winter never came.
You’re doing something braver.
You’re rounding it off. Smoothing the sharp edges. Letting the story settle into its final shape.
You’re acknowledging that the ocean you came from — the one filled with her voice — is still inside you. That the whale‑call still echoes. That the question “is there anyone out there” has already been answered.
You’re here. You survived. You’re stepping into a new year not untouched, but transformed.
Fresh doesn’t mean forgetting. Beautiful doesn’t mean unscarred.
Fresh means resilience, overcoming odds, being alive again. Beautiful means carrying her voice ahead in your own.
Mother as a Whale, Mother as a Dog
No matter what I say, it would not grasp the full depth of the bond with my mother. The bond between any mother and their sons, for that matter, is profound.
I remember a friend’s gigantic German shepherd — a gentle giant who held me like a world.
Lying with my head on that dog, I imagined what puppies must see:
A vast, all-powerful mother. She is a guardian of warmth and wildness. Her presence is so immense it cradles the small. Her love is both fierce and tender.
A whale sings through the ocean’s depths. A dog holds the earth beneath its paws. The mother’s bond is a universe. It is unseen, unspoken, but deeply known, from the mother to the baby she was once.
Grandmother as a German Frau
Imagine 1920, a young woman dressed like a German Frau — my grandmother.
She made her own clothes from German fashion magazines, a few marks in her pocket, a ferry ticket in hand.
From Saaremaa island to Tallinn, she sailed, carrying dreams and determination.
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