Lately, I've been thinking

Something new

The other night, as I lay not sleeping in the very dark darkness, I mused over what was top of mind and what might be ready to come into the light. This seemed preferable to trying to sort out the future of humanity, even though one is very much threaded through the other.  

Like most writers, I have a folder of drafts, some more developed than others. I use the term more developed loosely. In many instances, the only difference between a blank page and a draft is a 5-minute Google search and a pesky urge. It’s the last bit that matters most. The unfinished pieces, such as they are, that rise to the surface and claim the next spot in line are the ones I can’t stop thinking about.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about death.

Are you still with me? I know there’s shock value there, or morosity, but I assure you that’s not the intent. Someone with a finer filter, or more sophisticated social skills, would leave that Hidebehind in a distant wood and take a safer path to get where they were trying to go.

And then there’s me.

I can’t pinpoint what prompted this train of thought. One of our neighbors went full bore on Halloween decorations, and there are still plastic, skeleton-like ghouls staring back at me from across the street. They seem an unlikely influence, but my mind has taken me to stranger places in the past.

Last year, the same folks left lifeless Christmas inflatables strewn about their front yard until February, which had me feeling slightly murderous, so there’s that.

Of course, Halloween precedes worldwide remembrances of deceased saints, and souls, and my favorite, Día de los Muertos, which is as much a celebration of life as it is of the dead.  I’m not finding any direct lines from there to here, but I can’t say it’s not all mixed in somehow.

It could be the season. Lots of beloveds took their final bows right around now: My devoted dad, whose wholehearted laugh I can still conjure after 15 years. My friend’s mother, who kept her vital spirit despite what the cancer stole from her. My wonderful, new co-worker and sidekick, who told me we’d see each other again when she came home from the hospital. My spunky grandmother, who left when I was still too young to realize what a gift she was.

I tend to honor the birth days, not the death days, of those who have gone before. That helps me focus on the fullness of the lives they arrived here to live rather than the missing I do when they’re gone. So, I’d like it to not be about the losses, but it could be. Of course, it could be.

After days of considering how much our dying shapes our living, or the other way around, and wondering how it is that some people seem to be better able to make peace with it, all I know for sure is that while I lay there that night watching kaleidoscope colors swirl over the insides of my eyelids, a thought arrived with such clarity it was as though someone had spoken the words aloud.

Death is a way for something new to begin.

In the moments after, I imagined a series of photographs—bright bouquets of flowers, wild and unstructured, set before a white backdrop, each followed by images of the same blooms now past their prime, slack shapes in softer colors. Both versions were exquisite, one after the other, and as they exchanged places in my mind, it became impossible to tell if the fresh ones were emanating from the feeble, or the other way around. I couldn’t look away.

Who am I to say what death should mean or how we should respond? Nothing could be more personal, even as nothing is more universal. I am comforted by the reminder that death is generative. Heartache comes from asking the living to separate from the living, but I do not believe the dead experience the same grief. Instead, I sense expansion, liberation, exuberance.

As leaves let go and landscapes fade, I see my part of the world slow its breathing, relax its shoulders, and fold into itself, an old woman nodding off in her favorite chair. She’s done this so many times before. She’s just resting her eyes for a while. She’ll awaken to a new song playing softly in the background. She is content.

~Elizabeth