Musings on the Dead

Sandwiched between the news of Andrea Gibson and Ozzy Osbourne’s deaths came the 5th year anniversary of my mom’s passing. It arrived and departed quietly, without ceremony or song. I spent the day in bed, in and out of a state that was neither here nor there. I mostly wrote this off as another day that came consequently after letting too much of the world in too fast, and my body claiming its usual day(s) for recovery. But I remind myself that the body remembers everything that’s happened to us, sometimes even what has happened to those that came before us, and often takes the wheel on processing when something is too much to face consciously.

In the aftermath of Andrea’s death, there has been an outpouring of love through tender hearted tributes and spotlights on their life’s work. The online landscape of artists, poets and deep feelers seem to be united in communal grieving for this being of light who represented and ignited a shared spark we find in ourselves, one that the world often overlooks but needs more than it knows. I cried when I realized why I’d been seeing so many of their poems on instagram that day, and I cried again tonight after reading their wife, Megan Falley’s latest post on how she and her beloved, elderly terrier are weathering the loss.

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...My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.

-Andrea Gibson

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I can’t say I’ve had quite the same emotionally charged response to Ozzy’s passing, but it has been surprisingly moving to realize how wildly impactful he was and what a colossal legacy he is leaving behind. My boyfriend recently performed in a tribute show alongside a community of incredible musicians, and it was a powerful experience to witness the spirit of Ozzy living through them while simultaneously charging up their own. On another note, there is something undeniably delightful about watching clips of him bumbling through his garden while calling his cat a “fucking dumb shit mother fucker” as he attempts to save its life from the threat of coyotes.

As I circle back to my mom’s anniversary, I realize that I grieve her in pieces with every additional death that I face in this life. We are all of us entangled in this excruciating, magnificent expression of the universe, and once you’ve had grief kick down the door in your heart it remains wide open to all the reminders of loss and impermanence to come. Though my mom’s legacy may not be quite as loud as the Angel of Language or the Prince of Darkness, I know that her fierce and loving spirit dug its bare hands into the earth and planted seeds that would go on to grow into gardens of grace. I know that she lives through me and my dad and the land and all who brushed up against her in her brief and beautiful incarnation on this planet.

Here is a clip of her in her new home, shortly after she built it- the haven that held me through childhood, adolescence and the years surrounding her death. I’ll love you forever, Mother, see you after I’ve finished digging my own hands in the dirt.