My Greatest Performance

Some people, sweet and attractive, and strong and healthy,

                        Happen to die young.

They are masters in disguise, teaching us about impermanence.

 I was six when my beloved Aunt Ruth died. We were very close but no one ever told me she had brain cancer, they never told me she was dying and when I wanted to go to the funeral, my parents wouldn’t let me. “You’re too young,” they said. I sadly watched them leave the house without me.

Here in the West, we are taught that focusing on death is asking for trouble and it’s taboo to discuss it with children. Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, believes in teaching children about impermanence as soon as they’re old enough to grasp the meaning of life and death so they can learn the true nature of the human experience.

Nowhere is the transitory nature of life more strikingly demonstrated than in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of colored sand painting, Dul-Tson-kyil-Khor. A group of monks sit in a circle around an empty platform and they construct a mystical map, a mandala, the representation of a perfect universe. Then they lean over, put their shaved heads together and start blowing millions of grains of colored sand through a funnel shaped instrument. For more than a week, streams of sand flow like liquid and a beautiful design begins to take shape.

I had the good fortune to witness this one day in Los Angeles and I was mesmerized by the scratching sound as they blew and the magnificence of the developing art piece. But the real spectacle occurred when they were finished. After they chanted and prayed, the most senior monk placed his index finger on one side of the sacred masterpiece, pressed downward and swept it through the center of the painting. The rest of the monks joined in, using pieces of cardboard and foam rubber to sweep the sand into a pile that they would deposit into the ocean. All that was left was the original bare platform and a basketful of sand, a stunning demonstration of the impermanence of everything.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of life and death lately, along with many people of my generation. We grew up in the sixties and seventies and we actually believed that dying was not on the agenda. Or maybe we believed that it was so far away, there was no use to talk or think about it. The shocking truth, however, is that getting from where we were then, to where we are now, happened in the blink of an eye. Some of my friends are becoming ill, some are graduating to a different realm and when I wake up in the morning and get out of bed with ease, I can't help but think: There but for the grace of God go I.

We really don’t know whether living or dying is the ultimate grace. My mother never offered her opinion about death, she wasn’t one to share her thoughts about much of anything, but it was clear that my father was in denial. When my uncle was dying, the extended family gathered in a private waiting room in the hospital and one by one, each of us went into his room to say good-bye. My father went last and when he came back out, he declared loudly, “I think he’s gonna make it.” We all stared at him numbly and my uncle died two hours later.

I’ve done a considerable amount of hospice work and I’ve had no trouble being present for someone’s passing, but when it comes to accepting my own, it's a different story. I waver between being okay with it, realizing it’s part of the natural scheme of things, and seeing it as an incurable disease with a bad ending. As I write this, I’m not inviting anyone to try to help me or teach me anything. I’m simply telling the truth about the diametrically opposed parts of me as I do my inner work to find my personal truth. I often imagine it must be comforting to have a solid belief in what happens when we die, but that isn’t me. The only thing I know for sure is that whatever I believe or don't believe, acceptance is the answer. You may be a proponent of reincarnation, you may believe that it's over when it’s over, or you might accept that you’ll never know. But wondering what is real and what is illusionary is not the answer. Awareness and acceptance are.

When spiritual teacher, Baba Ram Das, had a stroke at age 65, he came to believe that it was a way to understand the pain of others, to help them know that whatever happens, “Death is perfectly safe. We’re all just walking each other home,” he said famously.

When I was in the ballet, I worked with a talented choreographer named Stuart Hodes who in his youth, had spent 21 years flying B-17 bombers during World War 11. When  he left the army, he turned to dance. He became an original member of the Martha Graham Dance Company and dedicated the rest of his life to choreographing and performing. It seemed like an odd transition but he saw it that way. He felt that working with the powerful Ms. Graham was like living life in the eye of the storm, the epicenter of an earthquake. “I feel that dancing and flying are two ways of getting to the same state,” he said.

I left the ballet in 1969, and in 2021, when someone told me that Stuart was still around, I contacted him. He was 96, clear thinking and alert and we had several wonderful conversations. We hadn’t spoken in a while when I looked him up on Google and discovered that Stuart had died two months ago, in March, 2023. He danced onstage into his nineties and I thought back to the last conversation we had. His voice and his intention were very strong when he said to me, “Dying will be my greatest performance.” And so I imagine that it was.