The Wizening Dance of The Dying

Dancing with Our Mortality- for Janie, Joa, David, Penny, Ginny, Tom, Sheila, Randall, Sharon, and You

My generation’s got one foot on the other side of life, if not our whole being. As our beacons cross over–John Lewis, Joanna Macy, Andrea Gibson– it seems like too many are leaving in this time of crisis.

Here in my own front row seat at the Mortality, Death and Dying show, I am also officiating a couple of “celebrations (?)” I can because my parents’ deaths initiated me. I’ve discovered that grief is inextricably woven into life’s fabric.

It’s pointless to resist. I practice the dance of powerlessness and discover its possible. I tell myself Death is my sister (Thank you, St. Francis) and bow to her. But when I hear that a friend is dying, grief might roll through me like a wave or hit me like a tsunami. I roil with irritability, gnash my teeth, and fall into sleep like a rag. Nothing beautiful or crafted rises until the waves recede a bit. I am in a big boat with people who get it. I am not alone.

Death wizens.

I recently asked my friend Sheila, age eighty-six, how we are supposed to do this. Her children and siblings exited before her. She’s the author of The Art of Grieving: How the Arts and Art-Making Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives. A top-level social worker, hell of a Warrior Mother, and the Goddess of Keep Going, Sheila keeps clearing away the underbrush that blocks our view of grief to show us that ceremony, dancing, holding vigil, and artfulness are how. This week, she was with her brother Miles as he died. This is what wizened looks like.

Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, alerts us orphans who’ve lost so much cultural wisdom that our ancestors are not just behind us. Our ancestors await our return to the ancestors. Neither linear nor circular, we are worlds within worlds.

Ancestry might seem like an abstract idea, a graph, but I sense it somatically and wish more of us could purposefully hold open the door between the worlds. My hospice chaplain husband and I carry enough anecdotal evidence that Beingness and Presence are not just fleshy things. As Natalie Goldberg puts it,

“Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, "Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place." This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.”

It helps me enormously to sense the continuity of life beyond life.

Today, as a young elder, I am attentive to the voices of friends and elders who are dancing with mortality, death, and dying,
Not able to rush to their side,
I presence them in the web of love.
I bend over.
I literally bow to our limits and suffering.
When I come up,
I peer into the pooling eyes
of loved ones who choose to keep living
I feel my way into a Greater Awe.

I pray I can keep letting go of the terror of loss so that I, too, can dance the wizening dance. For now, I listen and learn.

Four Offerings that are helping me

1. Holly Near Singing “Listening to the Voices of the Old Women”

Listen to the voices of the old women
Calling out the messages
Of the moon and sea
Telling us what we need to know
In order to be free
Listen to the voices of the old women
Listen to the voices of the Indian Nations
Calling out the messages
Of the earth and sky
Telling us what we need to know
In order to survive
Listen to the voices of the Indian Nations
Listen to the voices of the young children
Calling out the messages
Of the heart and soul
Telling us what we used to know
Before the lies were told
Listen to the voices of the young children
Listen to the voices of the Indian Nations
Listen to the voices of the old women
Listen to the voices of the living

Chris Williamson singing Morning Glory from Her Album Pray Tell

96 Years of WISDOM: Dot Fisher-Smith in Ashland, Oregon shares 3 Lessons That Will Make You Feel Awe

Beannacht / Blessing by John O'Donohue For Josie, my mother

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets into you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green

and azure blue,

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.