Thoughts on mortality.
A close-up of the top of a wood desk lined with a table runner and strewn with a red bud vase, ceramics, and ephemera.
Let’s talk about… dying?
Lately I can’t stop thinking about this term I learned — mortality salience.
This is the phenomenon of how, after someone important to you dies, you are utterly, awe-inspiringly aware that everyone is going to die. The truth of impermanence follows you into every room and conversation. This can be exhausting, but also, it’s a kind of sacred space, a way of coming home.
It’s where I’ve been living this spring. In March, Gary, the dear person I called my god-father passed. Two weeks ago, his wife Linda went into the hospital. I spent as much time as I could beside her, in the clutter and beeps of a ward room. She mostly slept, and I mostly held her hand, until she was ready to go back home. Mortality salience filled the air.
I told my therapist last night, “I thought grief would mean feeling sad, but it actually means feeling everything.”
This has looked like:
Surges of clingy attachment to my partner and my dog
Waves of awe and gratitude for having a life at all
Anxiety about driving, choking, walking near any ledge
A new ability to drop unnecessary worries
All the tears in the world
And… writing. Holy shit have I been writing.
I was in a slow period over the winter, but now I fill pages so fast I can’t even retrace my thoughts. The engine of creativity is set on high, I’m trying to make everything I can make. I think this is what Annie Dillard meant when she said “Write as if you were dying.”
I can’t tell you how grateful I am for writing community in these times.
I just signed up to run “late night writes” every Monday this summer at Fireside, which means that members can show up for an hour to sit and write together while the moon glows outside our windows.
It’s the simplest thing in the world, but feeling not-alone while writing makes such a difference to me. I’m also running our Life Stories Workshop for the first time in a decade, and feel so lucky to get to sit in big stories with my participants every week as the summer passes.
This feeling won’t last forever, or for long.
This awareness will blur, and I’ll pick up my daily, unnecessary worries and pretend they matter very much. Our brains protect us from the sharp edges of mortality, so that we can function and move through this complicated world.
I look forward to getting behind the wheel again without so much panic… But I’ll miss the aliveness of this time. Luckily, I have lots of notes to come back to.
There’s a prompt I used to use in workshops every so often.
It goes something like this:
Imagine that at the end of this half-hour, all the pens and pencils and keyboards were going to disappear. What do you need to say?
I’ll tell you a secret: everyone writes love letters. That’s just who we are. When we know, or we imagine, that the end is in sight, it’s all love.
Today I’m wishing you love, care, and spring buds, all along your writing path.
In it with you,
