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Dancing With Death

Death, grief and the end of life, have been major themes in my life recently. Last week a 23 year-old man collapsed at the Pittsburgh Marathon and became its first casualty. Friends and family were shocked, there had been no personal or family history to indicate his risk, and the story became international news. “Such a young man, such a terrible tragedy,” people chanted to one another.  Afterwards doctors discovered an undetected heart defect, most likely present from birth, but with no warning signs, the man had no reason to suspect his vulnerability.

collapse

A few days later I received an email from a former high school boyfriend’s wife that after successful back surgery he had collapsed in his hospital room and medical personnel were unable to revive him. We had recently reconnected through the Internet and exchanged a series of emails. A couple of days before his wife’s email, I had received an envelope in the mail from him with a photo of the two of us, fifty years ago, formally dressed for a school dance. His comment, “Where did all those years go?”   

Yesterday, a friend left a message on my cell phone. A mutual acquaintance, probably younger then either of us, is in her last hours. She had been fighting cancer but the call was a request for prayers to help her cross peacefully. I could respond to that request. As a mother of two adult children who have predeceased me, I have had the honor of being present at this ceremonial time, and I know it to be holy. In fact, when death comes too swiftly, it can be hard to not have the time to say goodbye.

bell2.imagesWe don’t admit it often out loud, but death is one of life’s few certainties. It’s lessons include an encouragement to savior life, every beautiful, terrible moment of it, and to learn to dance with the uncertainty of when, as John Donne suggested, the bell will begin tolling for thee. 

Published on Wednesday May 15, 2013 in Dances and Grieving. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

A Healing Ritual at Serpent Mound

It was a trek, as all spiritual journeys are, with five of us traveling six hours from Pittsburgh in my SUV. The Serpent Mound is in southern Ohio, not far from Cincinnati and my friend Vikki Hanchin’s recent book, The Seer and the Sayer http://www.amazon.com/The-Seer-Sayer-Revelations-Earth/dp/1452557276 told of her experiences there. So twenty or so of us set out to see for ourselves this jewel of Midwestern archeology. A world-class expert on the 5 to 6 thousand year-old effigy mound, Ross Hamilton, would be meeting us there.Serpent-Mound-panohttp://www.ohiohistory.org/museums-and-historic-sites/museum–historic-sites-by-name/serpent-mound

After the final hour’s roller coaster-like approach over hill and dale, on serpentine curves through fields and farms, Vikki’s stomach was talking to her, but not in a good way. Once we arrived, another passenger, a Reiki practitioner, began working on Vikki but each time she relaxed into the process she began to cry. It became clear she was tuning in to a sorrow beyond her own skin. When she told Mr. Hamilton of this, he shared that a few minutes before, he and his wife had learned of a dear friend’s daughter having been killed the previous night, crossing the highway near the Mound. A few minutes later when we began preparing for our Serpent Mound ceremony Vikki suggested, “We can help this family with our prayers,” and this death of a child shaped the ritual we were to do at the site.

imagestwowomengrief One of the participants, a Mohawk grandmother and friend of the family, taught us the chant her people sing to assist someone in their crossing. We began chanting to the young girl whose life had ended, suddenly and prematurely, the previous night.  As the ritual progressed, I began thinking of the girl’s mother and grandmother, and, having lost two of my own adult children, I felt called to do something for them. I brought to the group my need to call the names of these women, now in the midst of their unbearable loss.

I thought of what had helped me to heal and I taught the group a dance and chant developed by my Texas women’s spirituality group.  The movements begin as a spiraling of the hips, rocking back and forth as women do when comforting a child on their hips. “We are women, we grow out of the earth; beautiful, powerful and wise.”  The movements in the second verse repeat but the words change, as they did when I accompanied my friend Rose at her crossing. “We are women, we go back to the earth; beautiful, powerful and wise.”

After completing the chant and dance I felt a strong reassurance in my body that my book, currently in press, Warrior Mother, Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and Rituals That Heal would be helpful to other families dealing with grief and loss.    

Published on Tuesday May 7, 2013 in Art & Life, Dances, Grieving, Songs and Spirtuality. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

The Dance of Flexibility

Until a month ago, if you’d asked me if I consider myself a flexible person I would have said yes. In face, on some occasions I may have been too flexible, putting up with things longer than I probably should have. But there’s nothing like a construction project in your home space to test whatever good qualities you thought you had.

learning-flexibilityEver since coming down the stairs to my studio on the lower level and being greeted by water pouring from two light fixtures in the ceiling, tests and challenges to my character have abounded. Learning to sleep while fans the size of airplane propellers ran night and day to dry out the damaged wood, followed by weeks of waiting for insurance estimates and ordered materials to arrive. The workmen have been as polite and unobtrusive as possible under the circumstances, but I’ve been relegated to finding workspaces in various places around town. A senior center down the street hosted our improv troupe rehearsals for several weeks, and friends graciously allowed me to camp in their spare room when the paint fumes and disarray got the best of me. I’m told we’re nearly to the end of this destructing and constructing project but checking in with my insides, it’s clear my belly doesn’t believe it. 

Sitting in my upstairs bedroom, which is now the sum total of my living and working quarters since the floor refinishing crew has taken over the downstairs, I’ve thought of the quality of  “flexibility.” Being a dancer I’ve always thought of myself as having perfected the ability to bend and stretch in many directions at once but this experience has been showing me, I’m not that good at it. Especially when the impetus for such movement is coming from something outside myself and leaving me with not much ground to stand or sit upon.

There have been some humorous moments. One night we actually watched television seated on high kitchen stools in the living room in order to see over the stacks of furniture piled between the sofa and the screen. I’m sure I  overreacted today when my husband told me the floor might need one more coat than we’d planned on. I saw what I aspire to and how far I am from it when I read the late Everett Dirksen’s description of himself. “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

Published on Saturday April 27, 2013 in Health and Wellness and Story-telling. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Does Dancing Make You Smarter?

My friend Jim was a good son. A professor of religion at the university where we both worked, he was in his early 60’s. His mother Margaret was a widow in her early 80’s who loved to dance so Jim took her ballroom dancing twice a month. Jim’s wife was a nurse who worked the night shift at the Miller Brewery on the edge of town, so there was no conflict of interest in his loyalty to the two women in his life.

 The dance craze of the early 1980s was the Hustle, (think Saturday Night Fever). Margaret was a hip grandmother as she moved onto the hustle_aboutdance floor stepping on every beat of the music. Her shimming fringe-layered red dress provided a still remembered dramatic image as she and Jim became the center of everyone’s attention.

At that time in our community, in order to ballroom dance frequently, you needed to be a member of a ballroom dance club that rented a hall and a band once a month. In order to be accepted as a member, you had to have a sponsor and fill out an application detailing what dances you and your partner were proficient in. Margaret was a member of two clubs and she agreed to sponsor us. At that point in our dancing career we did what could be called “fake dancing,” walking or stepping to the music and imitating what the other more skilled dancers appeared to be doing. “I hope we don’t embarrass Margaret,” my husband said as we filled out the forms.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that, in our 30s and 40s, we were among the youngest of the dancers. “These people have discovered the fountain of youth,” I said as I struggled to keep up with dancers a generation or so older than myself.

 Years later, in studying how the body influences the mind, now called, “Embodied Cognition,” I have come to understand why dancing helps keep us not only happier, but smarter. Our brain constantly rewires its neural pathways as needed. And dancing requires and creates new pathways, building in a redundancy that overcomes brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. 

A 21-year study of senior citizens, 75 and older, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, set out to see if any physical or cognitive activities would influence mental acuity. The only physical activity they found that made a difference was frequent dancing. The study did not say what kind of dancing but Robert Powers, a dance historian concluded that these people would have been doing social dances learned in their youth, like swing, foxtrot, and waltz. These partner dances involve split second decision-making, which is part of what creates new neural pathways. And according to Fred Astaire, who advised dancers to “Cultivate flexibility,” by blending with their partner, dancing provide opportunities to learn socially from others. http://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/smarter.htm

 

Published on Monday April 15, 2013 in Art & Life, Dances, Health and Health and Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Children & the Stories Elders Tell

“That happened in the olden days,” my children would tell me. Their dismissive tone indicated they didn’t see any relevance to what I was relaying about the past and what they were experiencing in the present. I, on the other hand, have always been curious about “the olden days,” especially as far as family stories are concerned. My siblings and I would beg our Auntie to tell us stories of our mother when she was growing up. We questioned anything that seemed odd, like the fact our mother lived from ages 3 to 14, around the corner from her own parents and siblings, in her Irish grandmother’s house.

StoryMemoriesOne summer, getting the basement sorted out so I could teach dancing there, we discovered a box belonging to our father, filled with memorabilia from his college days. This provided a gold mine of information about parts of his past he never spoke about. From his photo albums we learned he had performed in a theater troupe, and since my brother and I were involved in theater and dance, we were shocked that our engineer father had never seen fit to mention this to us.

Recently I learned of a study that demonstrated strong benefits to children when they know about their family history. A team of researchers at Emery developed a “Do You Know? Scale, which was a series of 20 questions for children to answer about their families.  Questions such as; Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

http://shared.web.emory.edu/emory/news/releases/2010/03/children-benefit-if-they-know-about-their-relatives-study-finds.html#.UUdCq47xgTM

The results showed that the more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. Even if the family narrative is not all goodness and light, the fact that family members overcame challenges in the past says to the next generation, you can do so too.

Knowing that my mother was sent to take care of her grandmother when she was a small child helps explain my mother’s and my own sense of the importance of care-giving roles in families and communities. Knowing that my father was a thespian helped me to see that people are not just their job or professional roles. We all have many dimensions and hidden talents to discover and explore.

I loved getting confirmation for the important role elders and their stories play in a family and for the next generations. Since one of the most important things for children to know is a family narrative that shows they are part of a larger big body, one that has survived to this point, and likely to do so moving forward and beyond.

Published on Monday April 1, 2013 in Art & Life and Story-telling. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Is The Story True?

In a recent column, Maureen Dowd raised the question, “Why can’t filmmakers tell the story as it actually was?” Lamenting the creative license taken in Oscar nominated films, she objected to the fabricated car chase in Argo, done for dramatic effect, and the historical inaccuracy of the voting process for the 13th amendment in Lincoln, done reportedly for simplicity sake.

Creative non-fiction writers have been dealing unceasingly with the issue of truth, since their motto is “True Stories, Well Told.”  In finishing my mother’s memoir due out this summer, I recognize I’ve learned a great deal how complex truth actually is. In my family, as most likely in yours, people who were present for the same events have quite different perspectives on them. My book, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss, and Rituals that Heal tells events from my perspective. My daughter’s then 12 year-old son, her husband, or my son’s stepfather would each have their own views of the events we all shared. As a social worker, I know it’s not productive to ask who’s right? Everyone is right from their own perspective. In literature this is called point of view.

In my retelling of events I discovered that I sometimes misremembered details. An email exchange with my son-in-law resulted in some fact checking on some items I got wrong or didn’t give the emphasis they deserved. And any telling of a long complicated story involves selecting what to include and what to leave out. This selectivity becomes by its very nature, not telling the whole truth. When given the assignment at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival to write a scene from the perspective of someone who is likely to see it differently than me, I discovered that there was a previous scene to the one in question that I hadn’t included. From my perspective it wasn’t important. But telling the story from this other person’s perspective, meant the previous scene had to be included. Later, I decided to leave it in because it added a rich layer to the story.

“Truthiness,” Stephan Colbert’s made up word is defined as something that feels true, intuitively, without regard to the evidence. In spite of it’s being all in fun, I think he’s on to something. In a radio show recently I heard Maya Angelou say that truth is not the same as facts, and that in some instances, facts obscure the truth.  Since the meaning of a communication is in how it is received, I like the notion that feelings are facts too, just a different kind.  

Then there are the secrets withheld, to protect the innocent, the guilty, or to maintain peace in the family. I wrote a paragraph that involved my son but when I shared it with him he said that wasn’t what he said. His denial did not convince me because in my training as a therapist I was taught to write my client notes so carefully that when called upon to read them out loud in a courtroom under oath, I would feel confident of their accuracy. But whether he said it or he didn’t, I took it out and replaced it with another truth we both could agree on.

Published on Friday March 1, 2013 in Book Excerpts, Personal Stories and Writing. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Occupying Pittsburgh’s Market Square

Last Thursday’s One Billion Rising Pittsburgh event attracted over 400 people and was organized by New Voices Pittsburgh: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice, an organization that InterPlayer, Toni McClendon helped to start. These young, mostly African-American women put together on February 14th, with the help of volunteers of all ages, the most soulful, spiritually enlightening, community inspiring, two hour event in Pittsburgh’s downtown Market Square.

In addition to the stage where dancers from the August Wilson Center performed, and hundreds of women danced Debbie Allen’s Break The Chain, another corner of the square contained a tent the size of a solitary confinement space in a prison. The construction held artwork and petitions to obtain release for women incarcerated for defending themselves against the violent acts of intimate partners. A candled altar space occupied another corner, a place for remembering women from our community who have lost their lives to violence, a resource tent offered information about organizations addressing this vital issue, while the Comfort Tent offered support and respite for anyone strongly affected by this topic of violence against women.

When I shared information about this event with Coke Nakamoto, a dancing social worker friend in California, her comment said it all. “Absolutely love the consciousness brought to the Pittsburgh event. What vision and understanding of the bigger dance beneath the dance!”  No wonder I feel so honored to take the over 15,000 steps my fitness tracker counted that day, (three times the national average) to support these women in bringing their vision to such a spectacular reality. 

Published on Sunday February 17, 2013 in Dances and Gatherings. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The Path of a Warrior Mother

In looking at images for the cover of my book, Warrior Mother, I discovered early on that pictures of a skinny woman, dressed in battle gear, brandishing a sword were totally irrelevant. I found in Native American folklore, references to the path of the spiritual warrior, which was more what I had in mind. A spiritual warrior lives everyday, closely aware of his or her own death. And since death is guaranteed to happen to each one of us, no exceptions, spiritual warriors face that possibility every day.

Warrior Mother is the story of my journey as a mother, through the diagnosis, illness, and deaths of two of my three adult children. Looking back, as soon as my 20s something son Ken was diagnosed with AIDS, he was staring death in the face, and so was I. I become a warrior mother because I didn’t want him spending his then waning energy having to take care of me. As a model for him, I felt I needed to be brave and positive. As Dr. Bernie Siegel, who worked with those exceptional patients that defied the odds, said, “In the absence of certainty, there’s nothing the matter with hope.” http://berniesiegelmd.com/

In my readings I discovered the notion that what makes something sacred is sacrifice, not a popular concept in today’s world.  But when my 40-year old daughter called me, five years after her brother’s death, to say she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer, I did whatever I could to help her. It wasn’t want I’d planned for that time in my life, but when the mother of my three grandchildren said, “I want my mom,” that became my sacred assignment.

From all that we learned as a family from these experiences, lessons I hadn’t read about in other places, it seemed I needed to write about them. And since no family will escape having members become ill and die, it is my fondest hope that these stories might be helpful to others facing their own life and death situations. As Peggy Andreas writes, “This relationship with her Death calls the Sacred Warrior to be who she truly is, to live her life fully and completely, to use the power-from-within.” http://dreamflesh.com/essays/warriorpath/

Published on Tuesday January 29, 2013 in Art & Life, Book Excerpts, Personal Stories and Writing. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

By the Numbers

Looking in the mirror in front of me at my Zumba class I have a view of most all my fellow classmates behind me. I notice many appear older than average this Monday morning, this first day back from the New Years’ holiday. Not sure if they’ve changed or I have but it occurs to me that most of them are probably younger than I am. This is something I’m not aware of very often as most of the time, I forget how old I actually am.


On our family vacation last week in the Colorado Mountains at nine thousand feet, I felt 104. In the first two days, just lifting a package or climbing a few stairs meant becoming breathless and gasping for air. A sensation of suffocation would wake us in the middle of the night; I suppose in order to remind us to consciously take deeper breaths.  This altitude issue wasn’t on my radar when we made our plans to meet our extended family in a condo halfway to the stars. By the third day, our systems had leveled off enough to feel relatively comfortable in the thinner atmosphere, but I still felt more exhaustion than usual over simple exertions.

But the rewards came, as my son predicted they would, when we returned home to sea level elevation. Our systems having learned to be more efficient were now allowing our bodies to feel, by comparison, vigorous. I found myself energetically running up and down the stairs with the grocery bags, feeling like I was in my 40s again.
This dramatic fluctuation in age range has caused me to question again – is age how we look or how we feel, how others view us, or our own state of mind and attitude? As I continue to learn hip-hop steps in my dance classes, I’ve wondered if staying young might have something to do with continuing to do the movements that healthy young people do. And maybe it helps to not keep track too closely of the years.  I wouldn’t want my mind’s data computations to detract from what the rest of me feels ready and willing to do.

Published on Wednesday January 16, 2013 in Dances. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Learning to Take Turns

The holidays take us away from our daily rituals and that’s both the good and bad part of it, so this is the first chance I’ve had to get back on the horse of my writing practice. As I write, the image of one of the highlights of my holidays comes to me, my four-month old granddaughter, Kyra Joy jumping on her daddy’s knee.  She pulls against his arms that surround her trunk, seemingly poised to jump off of a high diving board into the open space in front of her. Adult relatives gathered around are having their first meeting with her and her charms; her dimples and smiles, and the sound of her laughter, she captivates everyone.

She seems to know that all eyes are upon her, and she relishes this assignment as the star of the show. Rather quickly, she recognizes our conversation as a game that involves taking turns making sounds. Someone says something, and then another person contributes his or her sounds. Uncle Bill makes sounds, so Kyra Joy contributes hers. Cousin Ethan speaks and Krya Joy answers him. Her utterances are not words yet, but she makes every attempt to improvise sounds with her voice and by changing the shape of her tongue.

As the grandmother I remember her Aunt Corinne at this age, always the center of attention in any family gathering. As the first grandchild on either side everyone saw her as the miracle gift that each child truly is. I remember when Krya’s dad, Kevin, came along two years later he didn’t speak or even much try to talk till he was 3 years old. When he finally did speak, it came in long full sentences, not pronounced very well. I always thought he hadn’t taken the time to practice. But his daughter is starting her practice early and catching on already to the notion that the main idea is not just to create one’s own sounds but to also listen carefully when someone else is making theirs.

Published on Sunday January 6, 2013 in Personal Stories and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: .