Dance With Me, Death

unimaginable sorrow, breathtaking beauty

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Here I am, writing quietly across from my Husband, toes touching underneath the aged wooden bistro table. A warm fire gently crackles in the stone mantle nearby, and country music emanates from the speaker nestled above. We’re tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina, licking our wounds and begging for the sunlight to heal us.

The existential realizations I’ve had in the last two weeks are intense and gritty. They take time to break down; one must chew on them thoroughly before swallowing. They get stuck in your teeth and often leave a biting flavor that lingers all day and all night - I’ll do my best to try to share them here in a palatable way.

I’m chuckling at myself as I try to figure out how to share my horrible news with you kindly, Dear Reader. I imagine you innocently scrolling through your Substack feed or enjoying a casual morning Instagram peruse, and I don’t want to ruffle your happiness. Typically, life feels normal and stable, perhaps even guaranteed. We wake up, our heart continues to beat, and the day lovingly presents itself to us.

If you (like me) have ever mulled over the concept of karma or reincarnation, the idea of God, as God, experiencing God in human form may feel comforting. There we are, mozying our way through the Spiritual aisle of Barnes & Noble, flipping through the pages of The Power of Now, Siddhartha, The Four Agreements, Signs, The Untethered Soul, Tao de Ching, The Artists Way, etc etc etc.

Yes! Yes! We think, “this makes sense.”

There’s a gnosis deep within that agrees: yes! - I am an infinite being in a precious, finite reality. So, I will eat well, get 9 hours of sleep, and take myself to the coffee shop to write my morning journal pages. I will try to meditate and quiet the rascal nature of my mind so I can experience peace. I will find someone to share my love with, I will have great sex with my eyes wide open. I will cry when I feel like crying. I will get a mentor, a counselor, a confidant. I will try breathwork and release the pain hidden deep within my cells. I will learn new recipes and tend to a garden with my own two hands. I will get to know myself and unleash my potential, I will dig down to the marrow and show up as the radiant, spectacular human that I am. I will continue to understand more every day because this life, this precious life, is worth my devotion.

I’m coming to understand that this fervor for experience is only half of the puzzle.

Two years ago, if any of the above-mentioned books broached the topic of death, I would read the words, enjoy the concept, tell myself I would file it away for future study, and let the information float aimlessly through my psyche. There was no need to dwell on such a depressing topic as mortality. Yeeeesh, what a mood killer. I’m twenty-four, I’m just getting started!

Oh, wise life, how you teach me all that I need to learn.

Photo by Adrien Olichon on Unsplash

A year and a half ago, my beloved Mom died suddenly, and everything I knew tilted on its axis, forever. An excruciating gift was given to me - my rose-colored glasses were ripped from my eyes, forcing me to see reality with breathtaking clarity. Only then could I begin to understand what the elders mean when they say: “Life is Precious,” or when I studied my Reiki manual, and it read: “Just for Today,” or when the cheesy wall art at Home Goods proclaimed: “All We Have is the Present.”

There is no greater Spiritual teacher than Death (by Spiritual, I mean living a life of Spirit, whatever that means to you). Death is a done deal. It’s going to happen, 100% guaranteed. Accepting the finality of our human form turns into our greatest prayer to life, a prayer that hums, pulses, and chants at the top of our lungs - I AM GRATEFUL TO BE HERE. This gratitude for a single breath radically changes how we show up in the world (but only if we let it). Unfortunately for all of us, our modern culture in most nations runs from Death with the maturity of a scared little boy.

As a Culture:

• We have little to no tradition or ritual that truly honors death - Pay the funeral home to stuff me with chemicals so I can fool the angel of death: Please, keep me beautiful forever. Bury me in a silk-lined casket that may never decompose. I want the Earth and God to know I’m staying right here; I delight in my separateness from Death, forevermore.

• Media portrays death in its scariest, most unrealistic nature, conditioning us to equate death with horror movies and zombies coming to eat us - How else can we learn that the human body and spirit are truly separate if we never have the opportunity to spend time with a body that no longer breathes? We need to feel that our spirit truly is infinite, or else life can quickly become meaningless. “Is this all there is?”

• We lack elders; we lack community - Without our Elders assuming their earned seats at the family dining table, they can’t pass on their wisdom: stories of humanity, life, death, and God. Children who soon grow up to be adults are often blindsided when grief and death come to introduce themselves. “Why did no one teach me about this?”

• We don’t know how to grieve - Every indigenous culture has a ritual that honors the wisdom of grief. It is clear that grief needs to be expressed - it needs to be felt and communicated through the body so the body doesn’t become weighed down by its immensity. Chanting, praying, singing, wailing, screaming, it must be done. Grief in our modern society has been bastardized into a politeness that is inherently toxic. Death is the most primal human thing that we do besides birth. We must be primal, raw, and un-censored in how we grieve. Quiet tears into a tissue at a memorial service doesn’t cut it.

The incredible, wondrous, mysterious nature of it all positions us to be students of life.

We have the opportunity to learn to dance with death as a testament to life.

Holding the immensity and finality of our human body is not easy or even pleasant, but it is rich beyond measure with meaning.

Photo by HAMED NAJAFI on Unsplash

Yesterday during the first whispers of the day, as the sun continued to rise over the hillside, while the perfume of wet hay and flower dew blessed my nose, I set about watering our forty(!) newly planted trees. In one hand, I held a ceramic mug full of hot coffee that, unfortunately, had its handle broken off recently. My fingers grazed over the sandy remnants of where the handle used to be, absent-mindedly funneling coffee down my throat. Morning ambrosia, how I delight in you!

The gift of a monotonous task such as watering 40 trees is that the body starts to go on auto-pilot, and the mind has free reign to gallop off. Sunlight hitting my eyeballs, warm coffee in my belly, cool water streaming satisfyingly from my hand, and feet planted on the Earth—these were the perfect ingredients for an existential gem of wisdom to drop down from somewhere great directly into my brain.

Do you know when something just *lands* and it will forever be remembered in your bones after that? It’s so delicious when that happens, I revel in it. I believe the kids call that a “download.”

My download was a big file. biiiig file.

Two weeks ago, my daughter died. My precious, sweet as honey 3 1/2 month-old baby girl left her body without warning. I will be writing about her death for the rest of my days, I’m sure.

But for now, stay with me as I water the forty trees with coffee in hand.

As you can imagine, processing the death of your baby is very complex and consumes your entire being for a while. There is unimaginable sorrow that, at times, feels like it is physically crushing your heart into a pulp. For a while, it feels good just to be pulp drowning in sorrow. However, somehow, right alongside the shadows of sorrow - there is also truly miraculous light.

Grief grants its students unbelievable insight and jaw-dropping love if the heart can be brave enough to receive it. Somehow, some way, I am truly grateful that I had the experience of grieving my Mom, so I was better prepared to grieve my daughter. Would I like to have them both here with me, still, in physical form? Yes. Of COURSE! This is, for mysterious reasons, what I am meant to experience in this life. No need for pity; you can send me love and prayers, and I will gladly receive them like a cozy blanket that shelters my heart from the storm.

Back to the trees.

We live in a valley filled with farmland, with the chorus of cows mooing from all sides. As the water streamed from the hose, the cows mooed, and the sun shone its golden glow on me, I looked up and saw a rainbow radiating from the union of water and sunshine. I instantly smiled. There’s my girl.

The day after our baby passed away, my Husband and I traipsed up the hillside of our land, laid flat in the grass, and wailed. After the tsunami wave of grief subsided, we stared bleary-eyed at the blue sky and saw a cloud perfectly shaped in the form of an angel with a heart in the middle. It looked like someone had drawn it on paper, and it was impossible to miss or interpret it any other way. We began to giggle, there’s our girl. This message of love from her gave us the strength to get up from the grass and pick out where she would be buried. Once we chose the perfect spot, we looked up again to the sky, and there was a brilliant rainbow in the shape of a circle. Just a circle in the sky filled with the most radiant colors. There had been no rain; it just appeared.

There’s our girl.

The hose rainbow is where my tree watering ‘download’ began:

I realized, hmm.. the rainbow is always there, waiting to be seen. All it needs is sunshine and water for it to reveal itself to my eyes. Similarly, my sweet girl is always there; although I can’t see her anymore, her spirit exists, nonetheless. What conditions do I need to provide myself so that I can be in the correct space to feel her and her unconditional love?

If we really are infinite beings, this should be no problem. Tapping into the unconditional love that exists within all things should be easy, but often, it’s not. Meditation practices help make this easier. Breathing, being in nature, and chucking our phones in a drawer seem to work, too.

If one desires to be plopped right into God's lap, where one must confront all finite facets of reality to ultimately surrender into the bliss and radiance of our infinite oneness, Grief seems to be the quickest way to get there.

Photo by Eliška Motisová on Unsplash\

Now is the part where I giggle a bit, viewing myself from above, having the download of all downloads. Where is my show on Gaia? I couldn't have scripted this better if I tried. It’s so silly, and so simple, and so blessedly human.

My baby girl’s middle name is Melissa, after the Goddess of the Honeybee. Her first blanket was covered in honeybees, and for some reason, this just became her symbol. We call her our ‘Little Bee’. After she passed, we have been visited by many honeybees. I went into the bedroom to find a little honeybee sitting quietly on our duvet cover. These honeybee signs have been everywhere, glaringly obvious. When I see a honeybee, I know that my daughter is with me.

Guarding the safety of said honeybees has become important to me, I feel a deep kinship with these winged creatures. If a honeybee landed on me, I would coo in awe and talk sweetly to her, never dreaming of brushing her off or hurting her in any way.

While I stood watering the trees, looking at the hose rainbow, a big ol’ fly landed on my hand. I immediately swatted at it - then quickly stopped.

What if Alinah is visiting me in the form of a fly?

Which rapidly shifted to:

What if Alinah is visiting me as a tree? What about the sun? The water?

What if the deer we saw last night was her?

What if the fox that ran by the car was her?

What if the little spider that keeps crawling on the kitchen shelf is her?

What if she visits us as a condor? Was that feather we found from her?

All of a sudden, I understood the concept of non-duality more deeply than I ever had before. My precious baby girl opened a doorway to understanding that is now wedged permanently open. At that moment, I understood.

Tat Tvam Asi // तत्त्वम्असि or तत्त्वमसि : “YOU ARE THAT”

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Unlocking the notion of compassion for all living things and dissolving the illusions of separation became simple: imagine/feel/know that this, too, is your daughter. Therefore, the unconditional love that the two of you share expands to all things, glowing and radiating with the most brilliant light.

Wow.

I felt this holy truth zap through my body like lightning; my jaw hung open, mystified. It’s one thing to read about these concepts - on paper, they often feel so far out of reach. When the understanding unveils itself in real-time, and the gnosis is FELT, it feels like a miraculous celebration.

This is not to say that just like that, lickity split, I have now realized my Buddha nature. However, this lesson was a magnificent invitation:

Can you see your daughter's beauty in this, too?

Can you see it in the sorrow? The loss, the mistakes? How about the broken coffee mug, the monotony of watering forty trees, the wrong turn at the stop sign, the mosquito buzzing in your ear?

How deeply can you let her love transform you?

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Thanks for reading,

Rohini

May the sweetest of honeybees grace your presence, reminding you of all that is good, beautiful, and lovely in the world.