Burying Our Plans in the Backyard

dads and death and the passing of time

Content notice: death of a loved one

Sunday was my papa’s death anniversary. Lucky year number 11. 

Lucky because I say so, and lucky because I strangely love this time of year, the season of Petra.

(Dad was dubbed Petra in the 9th grade after I learned the word pupitre in French class, and supposed it sounded more like what a young French girl would call her Daddy rather than its actual translation of desk. Acquiescing to the name, Poo-peetra became Petra and was thusly referred to as such by me and my pals up until his death.)

The season of Petra is a triple-header wham-bam stack of his birthday, his death day and Father’s day all within a one month span of time. It's an electric time of year that coincides with the late cascading of Spring’s bounty before we slide full-tilt boogie into the raucous fanfare of Summer’s jubilance.  I feel real tender during this high holy season, and more psychically open and receptive to the more than human realms. 

It does, of course, bring up grief for me–the obvious longing for someone no longer in this world of form –but this year it brought up an extra and unexpected rawness to the surface. 

This year I thought a lot about the season when he died. The month he got sick was during the Spring semester of my Senior Year of college. I don’t remember a lot about that time, but I do remember the Butoh workshop I was in at the American College Dance Festival when my parents were a few hundred miles away, huddled together in the doctor’s office receiving the news of his three month prognosis. I remember I also took an acting class that day where I was told I was trying too hard, and that I would later leave my favorite denim jacket with my favorite lapiz brooch in that studio, never to be seen by me again. Then I would get the call from my parents.

The things we remember. The things we leave behind. 

My last semester of college was filled with a lot of prep and scheming for what would happen after graduation. Part of my senior thesis was creating an audition reel for my well-researched list of mostly European dance companies. Hopeful future employers in my quest to become a full-time professional dancer for which I had been training so rigorously. I wanted to go, go, go, be free and out in the world, dancing for a very sexy, experimental, well-funded company or independent choreographer. 

2011 was a precarious time for the fate of dance companies–the writing was already on the wall that the institutional model was crumbling, and yet the singular focus of training to become a dancer in someone else’s company was still culturally obligatory. Or at least that’s where the most amount of social validity came from. Your worth as an artist and perception as a competent, proficient dancer hung entirely on ‘well who do you dance for?’ 

You can probably guess that the auditions didn’t happen, the European company didn’t happen, and I instead packed up my college apartment and moved home to take care of Petra for almost one month before he died. Plans scrapped. Snow-globe shooketh.

Caring for my father in his last days is the greatest gift I will ever receive from him. And from my life, at large. It’s perhaps the thing I am the most proud of. Even eleven years later, I am instantly tenderized remembering how he allowed me to care for his body as the life force waned. The innocence and vulnerability of that time has shaped me more acutely than anything else in my almost 33 years of living. 

And YET, a pang of grief so searing hot came for me this past week on the wings of regular dad grief, stamped with the flavor of a life path derailed by circumstances. 

I stole that line from Joni Mitchell who described her own work this way:

"I'm a painter first, and a musician second...I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance."

The morning of his death day, I put Court and Spark on the record player and danced in the living room. I thought of my body in motion as food for his spirit. I thought about the first time I heard ‘Help Me’ riding in the backseat of his car. I thought about my life derailed by death. 

I heard the bird clock in the kitchen chime on the hour with a sing-songy bird call. The chirping reminder that time is, in fact, moving and passing through me.

I think at the heart of what I’ve been experiencing is the grief of this very real passing of time. It was so easy in my twenties to be certain that I had all the time in the world to figure out what I’m gonna be when I grow up, having buried the dream of being a full-time professional dancer in the backyard in my mid-twenties. Instead of building a career in the conventional sense, I opted to get lost in the world, to travel, to be on the seeker’s journey, looking for some greater truths about living and dying. 

But now, pulling squarely into my early thirties, there's a growing sense of ~not all the time in the world~

I have crossed the threshold that all must cross where I feel palpably, in every cell of my body, that this rodeo will end. I am no longer under youth’s spell, in the Neverland of an illusional forever. 

And thus, aging is a kind of grieving. Grieving the closing of doors and pathways not taken. 

A one year death anniversary of your favorite person turns into number eleven, just like that. The fuck around freedom of your twenties will always turn into the finding out of your thirties, just like that.

On the other side of this grief-of-the-moment thing, after letting it take me under to have it’s way with me, I feel something like relief. A renewed satisfaction about every choice I’ve made on my path. And grateful for the alleged derailing. It derailed me from conventionality. It derailed me from a banal path of career legibility, and thrust me instead onto the wanderer’s decade long vision quest searching for the marrow of living. 

And what’s so lol funny to me is that I did live in Europe, and I did dance all over the world, just not in that sparkly name-recognition-CV metrics-institutional kind of way. But in the way that actually stoked the flame of my soul. In a way that felt like freedom at all costs. 

My sage, who is my therapist, who’s name is Sage and is sage as hell, said this yesterday on the topic : the totality of your experiences, no matter how far from a desired path, are the scraps feeding the compost of you. And now the soil of your thirties is rich beyond imagining, ready to receive the seeds of all you are building. Thank you, Sage.

This newsletter goes out to anyone who may find themselves looking backwards lately and feeling that hot pang of grief for what was not. Not exactly regret, but rather the acknowledgement that some versions of ourselves have had to die along the way to make space for who we are becoming.

I see you, I love you, I’m with you.

art: Katie Lebel

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In other news, GREAT NEWS, my workshop Grief Threads is back for the summer!

Grief Threads is a five-week online container for creative grief processing. This is the class where we use our personal fabric as an entry point into our stories, and learn to make something unique and gorgeous from the scraps we carry.

For those among us who wanna do grief differently—who wanna unpack our heavy stuff in a way that feels less like a support group and more like a magical summertime art camp with hot, sometimes-sad people. 😎

It’s truly a dazzling and alchemical space.

Our next cohort begins July 5th, Tuesday evenings 6-8pm EST. I’d love to have you.

photo: Jamie Hopper