Death is Also a Muse
Just as Calliope birthed Orpheus who descended, Death gives life to Grief...
1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.- Mary Oliver, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”
I am my mother’s first child to be born alive. She too was her mother’s first. Her mother – Rosalía – was also the first. Mi Abuela Rosalía was born to Viceabuela Cirangela en Estado Zulia. She was labored into her mother’s coastal home, facing an ocean rich in the competing histories that continue to converge on Venezuela today. I was born 15 days before my Abuela’s 63rd birthday, mere minutes from the Potomac River which empties out into the other side of the same ocean Abuela Rosalía grew up around. Every year since my mother labored me into the world Abuela made July all about me, so much so that I did not begin to feel how close our birthdays actually were until after she passed over. When my parents brought me back from the hospital, freshly arrived to this planet under a waxing moon, Abuela Rosalía was at home waiting for me. As I grew up and she grew older, we aged together in the same house. She is the reason there is no separation within me between English, my language of assimilation, and Spanish, my language of heritage. I live in both languages y me muevo entre los dos con facilidad. She is the reason that arepas with savory fillings for weekend breakfasts punctuate my memories as much as pancakes with maple syrup do. My childhood was her twilight. We belonged to each other.
Abuela Rosalía became a life-long memory on a Sunday afternoon in December. After seven years of winding its way through remissions and returns, the cancer that had sprung out from her left breast was satisfied; it had consumed enough. I was holding her right hand in my left hand as she began to traverse the veil. Her hands were soft, having been moisturized by my mother who had drawn Abuela’s final bath earlier in the morning, washing her own mother, applying moisturizer, clothing her in a comfortable house dress, brushing what little was left of her hair. Honoring her mother. By the time Abuela was ready to pass over, her hand in mine had grown quite cold, her breath barely perceptible.
July 15th of 1930, Abuela Rosalía’s first sharp breath was seen and heard by a midwife ushering her into this world. December 9th of 2007, Abuela Rosalía’s last soft breath was seen and heard by a granddaughter ushering her out of this world.
Abuela was 77, I was 14.
2.
The question is,
what will it be like
after the last day?
Will I float
into the sky
or will I fray
within the earth or a river—
remembering nothing?
How desperate I would be
if I couldn’t remember
the sun rising, if I couldn’t
remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t
even remember, beloved,
your beloved name.- Mary Oliver, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”
That first Monday without her, I was sent to school to sit for my first semester freshman finals. Business as usual. Her funeral was the following weekend, Christmas break arrived, the new year began. Business as usual. Over the next four years I would contract and contort around the wound Abuela’s absence left. Exhausted by what I believed was a directive to keep going, keep moving, don’t dwell on it too much; get good grades, go to college, follow “God’s plan.” Why are you tired? You are young, keep going, keep moving, don’t dwell on it too much; get good grades, go to college follow “God’s plan.” Why are you sad? You have never wanted for anything. Keep going, keep moving, don’t dwell on it too much; get good grades, go to college, follow “God’s plan.” A divorce is not an excuse for your lack of focus. Keep going, keep moving, don’t dwell on it too much; get good grades, go to college, follow “God’s plan”. I kept going, I kept moving. Business as usual. I would catch myself dwelling on death, divorce, the future, everything, and deny that I was doing so. I rarely turned in homework but when I did it was A+ material two weeks late. Often, I would get lost in books of my own interest in a far corner of the library and not go to class at all but show up on test days and pass with flying colors then stay after school for duties as the president of two clubs while being an enthusiastic participant in many more...on the days that I was not in detention for truancy. Perplexing and simultaneously endearing myself to teachers, testing my parents, running from my own feelings. Every day, God felt further away.
At 17, I won the senior class superlative of “Most Likely to Have a Famous Talk Show”, was accepted into what had been my dream university, and was nominated student speaker, giving a speech at graduation that resulted in many parents pulling me aside to let me know that I had outshone the valedictorian. But months later, I deferred my acceptance for a year and while other kids were learning to navigate college campuses, I was figuring out how to navigate the local job market and began balancing an internship plus two part-time positions. Fall came back around. I rejected my acceptance all together. Moving to Manhattan was no longer appealing. Majoring in theatre production had lost its shimmer. My deferred dreams of escapism through study were beginning to fester and would eventually implode. I was tired of living. What I wanted most was to collapse into myself and disappear. At 19 that’s exactly what I did. Retreated from my mother, retreated from my father, retreated from my sisters, retreated from myself.
3.
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind of you Keats,
So single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
- Mary Oliver, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”
Sleepwalking through 19 on my way to the precipice of 20, I was intrinsically out of commission and extrinsically pantomiming the basic motions of being here. Between my work assisting at a D.C. area casting company paired with weeknight shifts at a beauty supply store and weekend shifts at the front desk of a luxury salon/spa, an idea was crosspollinated into my mindscape: I would try beauty school. I had no plan or career goal in mind but something within me whispered anda Ivanita; miraculously, from within the depths of my displaced self, I heeded the nudge.
In trade school, I was the youngest student (by 17 years) in a robust group of career pivoting women, all of whom emitted dazzling grown-girl energy. They were polished and stylish, they had done so much living, talked with such certainty, moved with such presence and had the most wildly fun stories rooted in unbridled femininity. They were all Women™ and I was most definitely not a girl, clearly not yet a woman, more like some kind of Other in the liminality of a new decade. Every day I wondered, what on earth am I doing here?!
Three months deep into vocational training, I was activated and wanted to flee. Turns out that learning to give intimate care to another’s body while deeply dissociated from one’s own vessel is a disconcerting experience. What I did not know then, is that beyond theoretical and technical information about caring for the human body’s largest organ, I was receiving the seeds of a toolkit for future self-repair. Because to understand the inner matrices of human skin is to know that everyday our body is engaged in a delicate dance between vitality and decay in order to arrive at balance. Deep at the cellular level, the most granular parts of us are always seeking homeostasis. This patterning within the cells of every living being can be extrapolated onto larger patterns at both the macro of our interpersonal dynamics and the micro of our intrapersonal self-concept. I did not know this at 19 of course, but the seeds were being planted into the soil of my soul.
Free falling through 20, I completed my basic esthetic licensure and went straight into studying for my master’s license while simultaneously building experience on the job. Those early months in the field were unpleasant. I had a timid touch and a staccato flow. No one was trusting me with their skin beyond an initial visit. It mirrored back the reality that outside of the treatment room I was barely trusting myself with my own life.
I finally completed my master esthetics training after crashlanding into age 21. When state board exams were done and my master’s license arrived in the mail of December 2014, my mom told me that not only was she proud of me for following through, but she also believed that Abuela Rosalía would have been proud. Especially because back in Caracas, Abuela had owned her own salon. She showed me pictures of the family-owned salon that bore my mother’s name, and those images sparked something deep within the crevices of my fractured psyche. I had not grown up with the awareness that in another life season Abuela worked in beauty. I was struck by the parallel of this newly revealed similitude between us and I clung to it as if my life depended on it. Probably because at the time it did.
Curiously – prior to learning about the aforementioned connection – one year into trade school after having wrapped up my basic licensure and starting up theory plus practical hours for my master’s licensure, I had volunteered for a cancer-care spa day at the Washington Cancer Institute. A major cosmeceutical brand, one of the first to develop backbar protocols for treating cancer-impacted skin, had put out a call for volunteer beauty professionals to participate in the weekend spa event. That day at the cancer-care spa event, I arrived excited and left feeling more alive than I had in years, everything felt right and spirit led; I remember one patient waking up after having fallen asleep in her service, looking more present than when she had walked in, asking me “How old are you sweetie? You look so young but I can tell you have been doing this a long time.” Something unexpected had occurred on that Saturday, the timid touch had been replaced with tenderness and assurance, the staccato flow had been replaced with calm. I knew how to be there with each patient in those clinical rooms that had been turned into temporary make-shift spa spaces. I left tired but proud of what I had offered. Naturally, in the go-go-go of D.C. area life the magic of that day fluttered away as quickly as it came. On the surface I defaulted back to my insecure self, but deep down another sense of self had begun to stir.
Eight years later, having just finished undergraduate studies at Hollins University and now experimenting with a life as an early-career scholar at the University of Virginia, I found myself considering a path in esthetics again. It slipped out one day in conversation with a peer. He looked at me with genuine curiosity and asked what aesthetic frameworks I was interested in. Why reapply somewhere for a doctorate in philosophy when I could just apply the relevant frameworks to my research on cultural production of the Early Modern Circum-Caribbean and stay in the Spanish department? I looked at him with bemusement then chuckled as clarity arrived, remembering that I was talking to a committed academic, someone who thought I was considering exchanging one form of professional positing for another. Just before having mentioned esthetics to him, in my mind I had revisited the memory of that spa day at the Washington Cancer Institute and the sense of wholeness experienced that weekend back in October 2013. This particular memory was slipping through into my consciousness almost daily during that brief period of two semesters plus a research summer and then a semester’s leave of absence from which I would never return. My journals from that time period show me becoming increasingly aware that after spending over a decade locked inside my own brain, what I wanted more than anything was to feel embodied. Was it possible to live a life that was both cerebral and embodied? Even deeper, my journals from that season of dabbling in academia show someone coming to terms with the fact than in order to satiate my growing hunger for an embodied life, regardless of whether or not I pivoted away from the academy, I would have to learn to do something beyond thinking: I would have to learn to feel again. At the time, the proposition of a life filled with feelings was frightening to me. Feeling it all meant grieving it all…a process for which I had no syllabus.
4.
Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a singled one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll or crawl back
to the shrubs and then back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more of
life?
- Mary Oliver, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”
Death does not discriminate. It finds every single one of us. Through all kinds of endings. Death of ego, death of hopes, death of dreams, death of faith. Death of our animal companions, death of our bodies as they used to be, death of our families as they used to be. Death of lovers, death of friends, death of elders, death of contemporaries, death of little ones, death of strangers around the world or sometimes just down the street. The death of things as they once were and the death of how they could have been.
Just as Calliope birthed Orpheus who descended, Death gives life to Grief who inevitably guides us into a private underworld we are rarely prepared to traverse. Grief’s visitations do not discriminate, yet we discriminate against it. We relegate grief to funerals and maybe therapy. We try to get over it. We apologize when it creeps through our tear ducts as it shakes our voice box and tenses our muscles. We avert our gaze from it and try to move on. We would rather not talk about it as it is not polite conversation. We cower away from its proximity to us, which in turn leads us to shrink away from ourselves and from each other.
When let in, grief splays us open. It hollows us out, excavating the fibers of what we thought was a fixed identity. Grief challenges us to become receptive to the arrival of something new that has yet to be named. It roots us into the now as shaped by the past and severs us from a future erased through loss. Grief takes us into the abyss and dares us to look around. What does one sense in the abyss? For me, I saw the seeds of my own becoming and felt the embers of my dreams deferred. I held the child who was still waiting to be allowed to mourn. I fell apart over and over again, learning each time how to better refashion myself into my own image of soulful care, personal accountability, and self-belonging.
Moving through the abyss pushed me out of the academy and into a brief dalliance with strategic communications before circling back inside the treatment room. This time with a mind-body connection that had me buzzing. I lucked out with an esthetic educator at my new workplace who in three months of onboarding taught me more about caring for all skin tones and types than I had learned in two years of beauty school. First time clients became repeat clients, I saw my gorgeous and intellectually generous coworkers as inspiration, I began to recognize myself, I started to enjoy waking up.
Death gifted me a desire for inquiry. What happens to the skin when cancer moves through the body? How do cancer treatments affect the skin? What happens to a terminally ill body physiologically as it dies? How can the cancer-impacted body be better supported near the end of life through loving touch and skincare? Moreover, what short-term/longterm changes and challenges do survivors of cancer experience in their skin? Two summers ago, I enrolled in an Oncology Spa Solutions certification to find answers to these questions and learn more. Now, every two years when summer rolls around I have the privilege of diving deeper into this knowledge through re-certification, auxiliary workshops at a local life-with cancer community program and continued esthetic practice in-between seasons of re-certifying.
Beyond the aforementioned pursuit, death gifted me stillness. Death gifted me adaptability, death gifted me courage, death gifted me reverence, death gifted me intention, death gifted me presence. In other words, death gifted me my life.
Through aligned actions, poquito a poco I have grown to no longer resist the waves of grief that death has gifted me. These past few years I have let those waves carry me into parts unknown, into adventures not previously imagined. Grief has taken me beyond the abyss and onto the shores of joy. Together, we have walked through sands of contentment and into a mesmerizing jungle of sensations that I am still learning to name.
Ivana, your writing is stunning, poetic, and profound. Once again you have touched me deeply! <3