Ode to Death

Dedicated to

 Loren White, December 31, 2023  

NW Coast Artist, Carver, Father, Husband, Partner, Friend, Sundancer, Troublemaker of the best kind

James Haim, February 15, 2024,

Father, Land Community steward, guide, educator and friend extraordinaire

Laura Weaver, February 17, 2024

Author, poet, educator, mother, daughter,  beloved sister far and wide

 

 

One would think I had made friends and was at peace with death by now…

Others, as well as my own to come …

And as I sit in vigil for yet another one so very close to me, passing over – I am not so sure I am with it all in such a good way. So many to be with, to see, to feel, to know, to lose, to grieve, to honor and to celebrate….to stay connected to, as ancestors, forever.

 

It all calls me to return to death as teacher and revisit my earliest encounters thru till today

 

Paddling down the river, lead canoe, age 9, maybe 10 …the first to come upon the train’s conductor floating in the river…minutes earlier clearly going off the tracks …soon finding the entire train in the water.

 How are we as a human race going off the tracks finding ourselves in the waters rising?

 

Then when 13 — we all knew him in some way, John F. Kennedy was shot …

We were told this when in math class by our young, black professor at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. All shocked by what could happen to our president, our country, our loved ones.

Some weeks later, one of our beloved “Sisters” was missing …the one who walked along the sea wall praying each day.

No one would say … did she slip?

No one talked about suicide then.

Nor when my uncle, a few years later, shot himself…nor when my aunt “left” our family and her two twin sons. She had I surmised, been in and out of an alcohol drug rehab program or place for nervous breakdowns.  It was never discussed only told to me from one of my closest friends who had met her there.

I was with my grandfathers’ passings, all 5 of them, and so many Sunday visits to my grannie living in her chair for years in a small New York City apartment, smoking nonstop into her last days with emphysema.

 

By the time I arrived in college, I had, I guess, accepted it all, 10 close encounters by then – as part of every family, part of every life. Nothing much seemed in my way to fully love – loving my life, my roommates, my newfound “love of my life” Lester, my freedom to be “on my own” at last….until my closest roommate, Marcia’s fiancé was killed that first semester in Vietnam.

How soon after my other roommate was killed in a car accident…just like my 17-year-old camp counselor had died a few years earlier — one I almost now forgot to honor.

Now I began asking myself – maybe it is too much to love – to lose so many in this way?

How to be with such grief?

 

Death was on the street in all of the places I studied, in all of the wars I protested and all of the histories of black people I had come to love. And yet the Jewish boyfriend my sister had chosen to love was not okay to marry …not because he was Jewish but because we were Catholic…So many  questions I could not even speak filled my heart …It was pretty simple and came down to this …..

How I could be happy with what I knew was a world filled with what seemed unnecessary death,  sickness, violence? Was this a world I wanted to live in?

 

The deepest questioning of that began with the death of those I loved the most …one of my first romances crashed while flying a private plane, and then my mother at 54 …not long after her divorce, cancer spreading through her body. Two weeks after “walking her home,” my first long-time love of 7 years tried to kill himself …. It didn’t matter that we had separated 3 months earlier, that he had taken another lover, or that he had not come to my mother’s wake as he had said he so wanted. What mattered was I loved him and now for the second time he had given up on us all.

 

For weeks I could not speak …I was numb. Is that grief? I do not know, as I look back. The entire next year I remember so little other than pain in my body in a way I had never known, emptiness in my heart, and confusion in my mind. Why do anything? Any step I could take I would bring harm somewhere to someone ….any food I would eat there would be traces of some toxicity discovered if we looked closely at its journey to the table. Even if I grew my own vegetables, I  realized taking care of myself was simply not enough.

 

Slowly, ever so slowly, I was eating death ….the phrase for communion …eat my body and eat my blood. Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to tend my distress, giving my attention to distressed places and distressed people. It was the best I could do …perhaps my path to peace within? Some might say, why focus outward …you must heal yourself, love yourself. It never felt linear.

Really? What is first? Or what is possible? What is not me? What is oneness, interconnection, inter-being?

 

I name the others here I have not yet mentioned, to honor their being, their presence continuing in my life. Some leaving, it seems, far to early – some by their own hand and some passing in the grace of age.

 

My grandmothers, my father, Mary, Karen, John, Brint, Dennis, A. Barbara, Tina, Fisk, Barbara, Leslie, Rick, Stephen, Sierra, Alan, Zack, Michael, Jackie, Jaqueline, Robert, Colleen, Ariel, Mike, five out of my Sacred Heart class of 18 — way, way early it seemed.

And the timing is so clearly — so much of the mystery.

 

Now all these years later, the deaths of so many have continued and now most likely, will keep coming at a faster pace, given age …. in my family, with my partners, with whole classes, races, castes of peoples being targeted in this land, the ME as well as Sudan, Ukraine, and the 32 wars underway in our world.  The trauma I attempt to imagine is beyond comprehension and yet, and still, so many get up and go on.

 

As will I …as I have and will likely continue to do …

rebuilding a broken home in Colorado, I slowly began to dance again.

caring for the land and people at The Ojai Foundation where I found moments of peace in service, in prayer, in nature’s beauty.

responding to the call at the ocean I refurbished my Ark, sailed into loss of partnership and faced my fear of abandonment….

releasing two dolphins back to the wild, I released my sense of powerlessness, the futility of making any difference anywhere…..

responding to the call of loved ones, I surrendered to a place, Three Creeks, as my primary relationship, finding and offering sanctuary to myself and others…..

fasting in the desert, on the mountain, I found belonging; sitting in council I met, saw and sang with people in the ways I had always, deep down, dreamed were possible…..

lying in my beloved’s arms, I restored my faith in communion; one moment at a time, one step, one day at a time……

following the dolphin story, walking with water, asking again what is mine to do , to love and where am I to be?

 

Is our enlightenment, if that is to be, only arriving in the face of so much tragedy, at the loss of limbs, loss of species, loss of life on this planet? Did I miss the boat or is it time again to hoist the sails, travel thru this book of sorrow, open to grace and return for reconciliation, restoration, incorporation? So here I am, with death again, of ones I hold so dear and ask for the ease to let it be, to let him and her be and all be…with gratitude for life and death. Somehow, I begin again.

Hopefully with you toooooo.

 

Gigi