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.