Death makes me beautiful. The the bad decisions, hateful love handles, giant worries and failures - these become pieces of lint, with mortality near.
We think we’re grown-up. We think now that we’re in our 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we know life. Then Death walks up - gets all close. Suddenly the everything that seemed to be important dissolves. All that stuff was so easy compared to this. This, this, this… immense nothing. This too-big-to-make-sense-of disappearance. You were here a moment ago - gorgeous vessel for my love, stunning light that shone in my sky. You were here and together we made a constellation - even when you were billions of miles away. But now you’re gone.
I burn more brightly trying to figure it out. Trying to find you. Listening for your voice. The others don’t matter - I want you. One more laugh. One more bear hug and wandering conversation.
Somehow - the magic in you has turned to tears and grief.
I don’t know why, but there is also gratitude. And shame for that. All I want to do is cry and celebrate my body. I’m sorry I am grateful for your passing. It’s confusing. I want you here, but death makes me beautiful. The flaws and imperfections are alive and radiant.
I thought I was all grown-up. But I’m not. There is still so much I don’t know. Information is everywhere. Understanding is endangered. But it begins to grow in the wake of you.
Unless we open up, we never get to see or share the parts that come to life with the stimulus of grief. Just as birth catalyzes that which cannot be known before parenthood, death awakens something. It puts in motion the maturation of imaginal cells, those that sprout wings as we let ourselves go and expand into something new.
I undress: every sensation is divine. Every “could-be-better” is perfect.
To the living: Sit in the sun with me. Let me smell you. Let me hold your face and touch your skin lightly, like a whisper. Let me know the parts of you I didn’t get to see in them.
Death makes us all so beautiful.
