the veil gets thinner

As a child and teenager, death was part of a collective dream. It wasn’t up close and personal, but played on the screen of the black and white television and came in over the radio. I remember my second grade teacher tearfully telling us the president was dead and then watching Oswald being shot live/dead on the screen in my family’s living room. Many more of these kinds of deaths would follow, and nightly the news brought us images of the carnage of a distant war. Church bombings, casualties of war and assassinations of heroes were the backdrop of a childhood devoid of family funerals. Up until my twenties, I don’t think there was one funeral I attended.

My twenties seemed consumed by them. In my twenties, death came like an icepick. It hit hard and fast and it hurt. Bad. When I went off to college one of my new friends was raped and murdered. Before I was twenty three I would lose my father, my cousin who was also my best friend, and my grandmother. Death came quick by suicide, car crash, and stroke. These deaths came all within the span of three months, leaving me raw and reeling. I found solace in living on the coast of Oregon, and learned to know the rhythms of moon and tide. It was death that started my life as a witch.

In my thirties, death came slowly and insidiously. At thirty, I was finishing up graduate school in San Francisco and the mysterious illness that was killing gay men and I.V. drug users had finally gotten a name. Aids. Moving thru the city, it was impossible not to note an increasing number of bone thin men with lesions. Death began on the edges of my social circles, winding itself closer until I finally found myself as one of those surrounding a death bed of someone I loved. It was a time that people in their thirties watched many others of the same age go. Many of us of that age learned how to do the slow loving work of midwiving death, at the same time as learning to be with those who were giving birth. As it turns out, it truly is the same gate that we come in and go out of. By the time I turned forty, I had experienced the luminescence in the room that occurs when a baby is born and when a loved one dies.

Death pulled back in my forties. There were major life transitions and there were losses, but not from death.

The leaves are swirling in that particular way they do as Samhain approaches and the dead flow into the city. I’ve been preparing my molds for the sugar skulls, and I have all the makings for the frosting which will decorate them. I am fifty-two and I’m realizing that death will be a major player in this decade. Marla, Jan, and my aunt and uncle have all passed on since turning fifty. My mother and two other friends have cancer. More will probably have it by the end of this decade, and I’m pretty damn sure somebody I love will die from it. Besides the personal losses, it’s been since turning fifty that it feels like death is gathering up steam in the collective dream. The planes crashing into the towers and into the pentagon, the ever increasing deaths due to war, the earthquakes, tsunamis, Katrina, and the monks being killed in Burma, the deaths just keep mounting up.

I haven’t blogged in quite awhile. Some of it has been due to processing that I may soon lose someone I love, and some of it has been because of preparing to do Open Studios. In truth, it is because of both. I had a beloved Mexican papercut of a skeleton surrounded by animals that I wanted to give more life and that I wanted to make part of the show. I painted a juicy scene of a rainforest on which I was going to lay the papercut. After spending days painting, I went to take the papercut out and found it was glued to the paper behind it. No matter what I did, the life affirming scene would not and could not show thru. Several hours later, I found myself in my deck garden with two friends, hearing bad news about our mutual friend with cancer.

So, that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t think the piece will be in the show. It will however, be on my wall, reminding me that behind every death and every loss, there is a fragrant and wild jungle of possibility. Even if you can’t see it, it will be there. And in the making of this piece, the skeleton did change, and there is color and vibrancy where there was not before.

Let’s hope that’s true for how I feel when turning sixty.

This is going to be one heck of a Samhain.