Tag: Death

Death, Middle-Age, And A Rolled Up Sports Bra

The cultural cringe I’m experiencing is one that has been building since my 20’s. And middle-age is giving me the brass to talk about it. I feel like I’m peeling off hot, sticky, wet, shrunken, layers of social conditioning. I feel like I’m in a sauna dressed in tight jeans, knee socks, a sports bra, and a long-sleeved t-shirt. My hair is wringing wet. And all around me are people screaming, “you shouldn’t feel that way!”

You know that feeling of changing out of a wet swim suit into dry clothes? How the dry clothes get stuck and roll up? Maybe you’d have to be a fat woman to understand that I don’t know.

But, it’s crazy uncomfortable. And infuriating trying to unroll it and pull it down over skin that is still damp and has become sweaty after you’ve toweled off. Am I alone in this? Tell me I’m not alone in this.

Tomorrow will be my 45th birthday. It will be my first birthday without my mother being alive. I can’t believe she died at 64. It sucks. I always knew her death would be a complex issue for me. She was not at all maternal in the human sense. But, she was in the animal sense. She was a mother who operated in animal consciousness. Instinctual, sensual, survivalistic, dropping her young in the wild on it’s own after weaning. She was fiercely feminine, wondrously wild, awesomely amusing, and hauntingly hurtful.

While I am owning my healing I am finding that there are no resources to help me access perspectives about death that won’t leave me without the power to cope with it. My culture is largely characterized and defined and guided by American Christianity. So we’ve been conditioned to focus on the afterlife and how to meet all the rules that lead up to death so that you can go to heaven. Life gets plenty of study. The afterlife gets lots of attention. But, the liminal space of death has no press. How do I help my elderly grandmother cope with the fact that after a life of being exposed to constant trauma and disappointment that she was the one who found my mother dead? Why can I not accept her death? Why does death, even “untimely” death feel so abnormal when it is the standard of normal?? It has never not happened. But, we don’t talk about it. We only talk about how to be a good person and the streets of gold in heaven and family reunion that will happen once we get there. We are earthly! And heaven isn’t our final destination if you take the Bible literally. Heaven is a holding place for good people until the earth is destroyed and ready to be recreated at which time all the good people get released from heaven and somehow come back to the earth and exist as eternal humans where there is no more death and the earth will perpetually be the paradise that God wanted it to be.

Yeah, my cultural cringe is deepening. It feels like rage. It feels like an insult to my intelligence. It feels proudly ignorant. Militantly mindless. And, death is pleading with us all to better accept its existence.

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Inevitable Moments

There are these inevitable moments in life. Today I got word that a 3rd member of my family has died. My poor father is shaken with grief as this was his older brother. It seems there was a lot left unsaid. And, honestly I don’t blame that on either one of them. I blame it on life. This is the 3rd unexpected death in 9 months. To be perfectly honest, I began heavily medicating after the second one back in December. And, I don’t mean I’m staying high. I’m just taking a lot of prescriptions to hold me steady so I can still function mentally. I still haven’t regained my ability to walk more than about 1800 steps per day with lots of rest periods and that still carries a bit of repercussion with bouts of tachycardia at bed time when my body is trying so hard to recover from the strain of movement on top of the emotional trauma of the past year. My cat died, my mother died, I lost 2 vehicles, almost got evicted, had to move in with a relative because I can’t afford rent anywhere anymore due to soaring cost of living and I’m not able to work right now and won’t be able to for quite some while. I lost a younger cousin. The last surviving son of my elderly uncle. I can’t believe he lost both of his children and faces his elder years without them. I can’t believe me and my mamaw and brother have to face the future without my mother. There’s just so much. And, while I’ve said since 2017, “I can’t take anymore.” I do. I’m writing this because I’ve just taken so much more than I ever dreamed possible and still survive it. Granted, I have lost my mobility to emotional trauma and stress and I am heavily medicated and have packed on more weight than I thought I ever would. I have taken a toll. But, I’m here. Writing.

There are these moments in life that are inevitable. And it sucks when they all pile up together rather than being spaced out allowing time for recovery before the next crisis. But, here I am. Doing all the nervous system things, leaning on my friends, loving on my family, appreciative of the shelter, helping where and how I can. And, writing. Oh, I also made the Dean’s list at University and am about to publish my first book in about a week or so. All this during the hardest years of my adult life. And, I’m middle-aged and that sucks honestly. Because of the crisis I have not been afforded the opportunity to find the “finally don’t care” attitude that I hear women talk about when they get a certain age. I haven’t found the solidity women say they feel at my age because to walk in my world feels like the globe has been greased and I too have been oiled and walk on it slick and naked. Vulnerable and no balance. My world feels like a greased pole where the floor is lava.

There are these inevitable moments in life. And, when they come…you can’t pray them away, you can’t manifest them away, you can’t cuss them away, you can’t wish them away, you can’t science them away, you can’t psychology them away, you can’t religion them away, you can’t God them away, you can’t spell them away, you can’t gather an army of friends, family, or politicians to resist them or tell them to go away, you can’t write them away, you can’t therapy them away, you can’t spiritual them away, you can’t atheist them away, you can’t hide from them, you can’t run from them, you can’t deny them, you can’t sublimate them, you can’t pay them away, you can’t doctor them away, you can’t medicate them away, you can’t exercise them away, you can’t work them away, you can’t sleep them away, you can’t drink them away, you can’t starve them away, you can’t not see them.

But, you can allow your friends to love you through them, you can let your family hold you through them, you can let your cat or your dog lay on your chest and lick your tears as they fall. You can open your chest wide and accept that these moments are life too. You can acknowledge that your steps are in sync with the march of humanity and that your footfalls imprint the human continuum and whether it feels like it or not you are right where you’re supposed to be. You, me, we….are part of the marvel. The dynamic, diverse, prism that is humanity. One massive, non-congruent, yet deeply cohesive at the same time, collective unconscious, reflectively conscious, forging forth for a better day.

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Naked In The Wake Of The Reaper: Reflection On The Emotions Of Moving Forward While Mourning

Navigating forward through grief to get back into daily routine feels like crawling through a briar patch. Trying to present yourself to the world as grounded as one possibly can be 35 days from something that was so dark and complicated and even macabre can feel unfair. inauthentic. I’m calm, kind, productive, caring, sensitive, and…trying. But, there is an inherent awkwardness in this space. It’s like being in public naked but trying not to “feel” like you’re naked. Being naked but trying to obscure the more offensive parts of yourself so that you don’t end up incurring the misunderstanding or discomfort of others. As a trauma survivor and an empath who is doubly sensitized from trauma the discomfort of others….feels dehumanizing to me.

I never could have anticipated the tangled mess of absolutely contrasting emotions that would arise from my mother’s death. And this bothers me because I’ve always been able to anticipate my own emotions. It’s kept me safe since the age of 4.

35 days….and I feel as vulnerable as a 35 days old human. There is a strange rebirth of me that has happened since she died. A new me that is washing in piece by piece with the tides of this new chapter.

This part of my life has started but I never got to have an intermission. There is a scene change that I never got to get dressed for. I’m a new character who didn’t get to see the script before it was show time. Yet, now is not the time to improvise. Now is the time to acknowledge that my own curtain call is coming. What happens between then & now is critically important if I’m to leave the world stage with a standing “O” rather than have rotten tomatoes thrown at my funeral.

I’m still covered in the dew of death. Naked in the wake of the reaper. As I watch him go all I hear are the words, “break a leg.”

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No Water For The Wolves

Lying in the silence. All is black around me save my phone and wifi light. And all I can think about is how my mother’s death is stirring in me an even greater fire and resolve to be living light. I want my light to shine into the cosmos and to be a home to every human without exception.

I want to be….wide, long, deep, tall, ever expanding light, warmth, and peace and safety.

I want my table to extend into the nations.

Where there is light people feel seen, where there is light there is clarity, there is life, there is strength, and hope.

In a world filled with humans who despise what they don’t get, fear what they can’t understand, and murder either with their thoughts or hands those who are divergent…..I want to be different.

Love is beautiful anarchy

Light is the epitome of rebellion against darkened understanding

Brilliant bright light so the world can see
Recklessly loving us all into anarchy

While the planet is threshed wheat from tare
I’ll gather and glean to me those in despair

It is enough for those standing accepted in the sun
To carry the status of a chosen one

I’ll cast my lot with the vagabond parade
I vomit at the charity of pretentious charade

Babylon, Babylon, can’t you see she’s imploding?
Or are your ears deafened from your own gloating?

Superiority, elitism, white washed graves
Their throats lie open like wilderness caves

But they won’t catch me or mine
Unbeknownst to them we are made of brine

And, I refuse to give them water…

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The Surest Compass: A Mourner’s Song

Through the canopy of humidity and trees
The sunlight shines and seems to beckon me

From the moss covered wooden bench I lifted my gaze
Unsure how long I’d sat in a heated daze

A hawk crossed the opening as I looked to the sky
A helios portal just wide enough I could see her fly

My eyes burned from my briny forehead drip
As sweat beaded upon my upper lip

My heart beat slow but hard within my chest
As I wondered was it the hawk or me who arrived as a guest
On my journey I grew overwhelmed and had to pause to be seated on the path below
And From her flight path she saw my summer-flushed face aglow

It occurred to me in this moment we had arrived at the same place and the same time
There was a lesson for us both revealed in this rhyme

A profound revelation bubbled up from the spring of my root
The point had emerged from cocoon and was no longer moot

A matter became a lesson birthed from synchronicity
Progress on one’s path requires complicity

Comply with soul lest it leave you be
And follow your knowing like the wise growth of a tree

Rage against the dying of the pure light of innocence
Turn to mother nature with organic penitence. 

She will open portals amongst interwoven branches and limbs
Her winged messengers timing aren’t based on whims

The whole of the wild is a natural mirror
And immersed in its bramble we learn to see clearer

The irony of the ironic
Is the best medicine I’ve swallowed

It’s an antivenom kind of tonic
That breaks us free from what we’ve wrongly followed

The lesson wrapped rhyme is as simple as this
No matter your path the surest compass is bliss.

© Cozett Dunn July 10th, 2023

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