The garden harvest is in. We have given thanks and the last of the radicchio is holding on for dear life. Winter coats have turned our closets from shades of yellow, green and pink to black, grey and downright blue.
Every November, my Nonna Rosina would talk about “the dead days” as though it was a kind of a holiday. She couldn’t come back from Italy until after ‘the dead’ — those first soulful days of November. While I knew about the Mexican tradition celebrating the loved from lives gone by, I didn’t understand - until I had kids of my own - that I can actually make it feel like a holiday.
As we sat to watch the brilliant, colourful THE BOOK OF LIFE and the joyful, poignant COCO, my feelings of celebration cemented into the idea of this obscure thing we call death.
My Connection to Death
Not everyone is comfortable talking about this scary subject. I certainly did not have much of a relationship with it until the sudden loss of my big brother John. I still had grandparents in my early forties and apart from losing my beloved dog Gypsy when I was five, I was pretty much thinking life was filled with happy bunnies and rainbow unicorns. Then, seven years ago, this family tragedy gravely altered my perspective. I simply could not deal with it.
At John’s funeral, an old highschool friend, who had lost his big brother in a car crash shared, “I learned at a young age that someone you really love can be taken away just like that.” (No wonder André was always so easy going.) .
I could not manage the emotions so I turned to facts. I started reading books on grief and learned that Joan Didion, who wrote the timeless A Year of Magical Thinking found research showing that in the 1950’s, death and palliative care — which started to shift to hospitals versus people’s homes — became a taboo subject. It just wasn't cool to tell people you were actually falling apart. So grievers began to hide their trauma for fear it would make others uncomfortable and those others, in turn, began to feel even more uncomfortable.
Thankfully, now that we are all about bringing our full selves to the party, we can be as distraught as we feel and the 'others' will understand. Attitudes have shifted back and we are managing with more resources and more tenderness, as witnessed by the abundance of TV shows and famed personalities doing podcasts on grief. Doing talk therapy was immensely, well 'theraputic' and in this tiny basement office opposite the obligatory couch, I found the most helpful tip to get me through those first few lost years. It came in the form of a dusty, framed poster on the wall with a quote by Carrie Fisher:
“Take your broken heart and make it into art.”
As a children’s book author, I tend to think in cute, furry animals to solve a problem. So it was natural to write a picture book for John. The Tallest Tree is about a girl who has the tallest tree in the neighbourhood and she loves her tree — always picnicking, climbing, playing. It’s in her bedroom window and is the first thing she sees in the morning and the last thing she sees at night. She was exctied to hang a wind chime on it. But suddenly, the tree falls. There was no storm, no wind, no warning. Like all the unanswered questions that come ... there are so many tall trees in her neighbourhood, why did her tree have to fall? It took a while, but with the help of her friends racoon and chickadee, she plants a new tree. It’s not the tallest tree and she cannot see it from her window but when the wind blows, she can hear the chimes and she knows it’s there — just like the tallest tree.
So here I am, seven years later ...making art to lighten my heart. My skin cells have all renewed and until the next tragedy at least, I’m feeling pretty good about the relationship between life and death. All to say, I accept that “It is what it is”, as John would say.
I have been blessed to grow up in a big Italian family with a lot of paesani around though as the years whizz by, I'm getting my funeral shoes out a bit more often and I'm realizing that at some point, everyone has to go. At a recent visitation, my cousin, who sadly I only get to see at these 'special occasions', was kind of mortified when I happily told him I had a song picked out for my own proceedings. His light-hearted wife was very quick to tell me studies have actually concluded that planning your own funeral can enhance your life and shows one to be more present aiming to live life in a way that makes them appreciate happy moments and the people in their lives. I'll take that. This sure gets me thinking of the full playlist now.
This is where art really holds it's promise. It lets us engage with a concept that is so unknown, so scary, but that can also let us feel so light and fun and full of life. While I'm not going to host a Death-Café just yet, I'm going into the darkest days of winter accepting that death is a part of life. So, let's let our inner kid out to celebrate it. Think about how “Happy we'll be beyond the sea” when I reunite with my all my loved ones, happy bunnies and rainbows unicorns.
In the meantime, forget summer greens! It's time to get the radicchio balsamic salad into rotation and, as I up my funeral wardrobe game, appreciate that everyone looks good in black.
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