Dancing Our Way Through Life While Death Whispers in Our Ears

On knowing our fate and living it up anyway

It’s funny how death dances beside us from our first breath until our last gasp. When I think about death, it’s not symbolic deaths and renewals that grip my spirit, though they are plentiful. The death of my parents’ marriage. The death of my maiden name. The death of myself as a person without children. And so on and so forth.

I’m three years into my fifth decade of living. Literal death has visited, but not often, not frequently. I knowingly await the crowded dance floor as my friends and loved ones age.

Death is my invisible dance partner annunciating life’s seasons deepening our awareness

nudging my psyche to imprint memories

coming of age ceremony my sixteen year old head adorned with a baby’s breath wreath woven greenery, pink flowers

getting hitched at the courthouse sans panties and exchanging mall kiosk rings

kissing and making up over two decades

soundtracks played at our children’s vastly different births

Death escorts the living dancing to distinctive beats swaying into our consciousness

Grandpa Bob died around the time my parents split up. I was four or five. We’d met once — I remembered him as a cheery fellow. He told me I was full of “piss and vinegar” and I basked in his compliment as I watched him play the organ in his living room.

Deaths and loss flitter through my memory. Childhood pets — a goldfish flushed down the toilet, a canary gone, puppies taken early by distemper.

Sometimes I wished I hadn’t been born or that my parents would die. Is that such a terrible thing to admit? Do the majority of children have these macabre thoughts? When life felt uncontrollable, it seemed death could be an easy fix.

Then death started parading around me.

I was in middle school when violent deaths cut in to dance with me. Two peers shot to death. This was in the 1990s. Both were family incidents.

Carrie’s father shot her and then himself. He left a confession on their answering machine. She’d been “slow” at school and teased relentlessly. Now, she was gone. Jason was in his home when he was killed with a gun. The investigation turned up inconclusive. Two kids born and gone faster than a shooting star.

Jason was a neighbor. I still have a photograph of him on his bicycle. His face isn’t clear.

It wasn’t adults I noticed dying in my under-eighteen world. It was children like me. It was the kids at Columbine. It was death by gun wounds. I was pissed and scared and had no idea what the world would be like when my kids turned 10 and 13 in 2020.

The first funeral I remember attending was my husband’s cousin’s. She was in high school.

Newlyweds, courthouse hitched in our early 20s

I got the call stilted silence,

“I just got some bad news Jaime got in a car crash She didn’t make it”

17 years old and gone I’d met Jaime once before all red curls and confidence plans for a future snuffed out soon after

This first funeral shook me to my core

Fished out a dead fly from my before-funeral Sonic French fries — seemed appropriate

Aunts, uncles, slideshows, tears life —

Death has a way of accumulating faster in some lives than in others. I’m 43 and death has mostly been a whisper. The older I get, the louder death chatters to me. I find it in prose, film, social media feeds, the news, word of mouth, poetry —

Adolescent road trip “Mom, that’s 13!” Counting roadkill gleefully tallying death I must’ve been 13 when death felt far enough away that it wouldn’t couldn't catch me because even though peers had died it was at the hands of their families and that would never happen to me

In my middle years, I find myself living cliches — time speeds up when you have kids, when you get older; when you reach middle age you begin to consider and accept your own mortality; we wouldn't make it without leaning on each other.

Later, I had visions — perhaps I traveled through time and space. I’ve found myself in Africa. I’ve seen a neighbor hang himself. I’ve felt my great grandmother’s love and run upstairs, full of fear. Ghosts? Apparitions? The older I get, the more I trust in the blurred lines between time, space, and selves.

We die little deaths every day. Shed old cells. Regenerate new ones. Our bodies are miracles. Our Earth is divine. I’m not religious. Religion irks me. I see it as an instigator of wars and terror. I don’t know how humans survive divided and fighting all the time.

If death is so awful, why does it get the privilege of la petit mort?

the ecstatic kind of death a little part of our selves dying and rebirthed during sex What if our final breath felt like our best ever orgasm?

Do we have celebratory wakes or sorrowful funerals? Do we mourn or celebrate that our births are also our death sentences? Do we find ourselves flailing inside the paradox of living, trying to booze, buy, or charm our way out?

When I consider death, I wonder what life — this life — is all about.

In my late 20s and 30s, my remaining grandparents passed away, one by one, until they were all gone.

How could I forget my great grandma’s funeral? I think it was my Bubby’s. The one where Aunt Rosalie let me choose lipstick from her lipstick cabinet. Rows and rows of different colors. I chose red and wore it proudly. I must’ve been nine or ten. Mimi was shaken, irritated, frustrated.

Child, you shouldn’t be wearing lipstick Who gave you red lipstick Aunt Rosalie? Tsk tsk And, to a funeral, no less Here’s a tissue Wipe it off

Funerals were stuffy and full of rules. My stepmom’s mom’s wake felt more alive. Food and love and loud tears.

Later, Mimi’s funeral on a warm day, outside. A butterfly landed on the rabbi and I knew something was right.

Remembering death isn’t linear. I wonder who will go first. My husband or me? My mom, dad, or stepmom? When will aunts and uncles start passing away?

I’m 43 and death has been waltzing outside my house, visiting other folks. When will death descend, cloaking me with stacked towers of deaths as my friends have experienced?

Those eight tight friends from high school. When will our time be up?

It doesn’t feel morbid to think this way. It feels realistic.

I believe we create our own hells in our psyches. When our bodies quit functioning, our essence goes somewhere. Reincarnation is the closest I get to a spiritual belief.

Some insects live for days or weeks. Some animals span more time than our species.

Perhaps the human awareness of large swaths of time is what actually cuts right through us and makes us anxious, lost, afraid.

When death comes, I want to mourn and celebrate. To recognize the paradox of life. To accept what is not understood and sashay, sway — dance like a madwoman with people watching.

Death of my single self Death of youth Death of not-mother Death of student Death of gardener job Death of meek and shy Death of taking the backseat Death of low self-esteem

To get a little abstract, the little deaths I celebrate are the transformations of my consciousness that arise from suffering and grief. The little deaths I celebrate are the ones I leave behind in order to go forward with the people I love. The me that cannot sustain anymore and so a new version of myself is birthed.

I believe this is how it is for all of us. A swirl of death at varying degrees. Orgasmic death. Metaphorical death. Spiritual death. Literal death. Layers to explore as we experience the grief of what was and the joy of welcoming new growth.

We create a layer cake of humanity.

Let’s dig in.