My second project was about small deaths. People experience these every day, but they receive much less fanfare than death death. To illustrate my thoughts on the matter, I wrote a piece about the death of innocence, had my dear friend Larissa write a piece on motherhood, and I interviewed my 73 year old therapist to garner her thoughts on the subject. She spoke of the pain she endured when her partner of 38 years became unavailable for physical touch. I found a Stephen Dobyns’ poem which brilliantly captures, I feel, the chasm that can form between two people.

My original plan for the performance was to lie on a table naked as though I were on a burial shroud. I would have had a large piece of thin, translucent cloth over my body as well as an additional piece of the cloth in the shape of my body invisible to the class. I had recorded myself reading each passage followed by the Shearwater song, “On the Death of the Waters,” and the plan was to have the cloth in the shape of my body rigged with fishing line over the light grid, so that when the song exploded, my “soul” would lift from my body and up into to the stratos. Fortunately for me, I could not rig the body with the fishing line and keep it taut in the right places in order for it to stay flat. I say fortunately because the body looked ridiculous…like Peter Pan’s shadow. BUT when I manipulated the cloth with all of the fishing line it looked like a jellyfish. Ok, so back to the drawing board. Turns out, jellyfish symbolize acceptance and there is a certain species that can mature and then revert back to a polyp stage and then mature and then revert back and so on…forever and ever, amen. If nothing kills them, they are biologically immortal. Bingo!

So, day of performance: Everything was the same as above except I cut a slit in the top piece of cloth and placed the jellyfish underneath it but with the fishing line pulled through the hole. I also added a blue light (which I hid in my hands) to the inside of the jelly. The table was lined with candles and the lights were off as the class silently filed into the room. They sat and listened to the passages and took note of the dead girl on the burial shroud in the center of the room. As the song crescendoed, the jellyfish emerged from my body and floated upwards, hovering as the candles were silently blown out and the song concluded.

I filmed the presentation, but unfortunately, it was too dark to see anything. I suppose you’ll simply have to use your imagination.

The passages and audio track are as follows:

I
Death doesn’t always arrive with the sound of trumpets, a burst of regret or flashes of life. There doesn’t always follow a procession of black, a vermiculate corpse, a scattering on the wind. My first death left me very much alive. Alive and peeled back, raw, my nerve endings trembling. Mind racing. Spirit numb. My first death was accompanied by a silent and paralyzing fear, by evolution in the form of self preservation. I had always wanted to fly. When he kissed me and I realized what was happening I floated to the ceiling. This may happen but I refuse to be in this body when it does. At twelve, I had never been kissed. I had just started to bleed. I still loved cartoons and playing outside. I existed in a world full of wonder and protection and absent of all things dark. And in one moment a heavy curtain was drawn over that existence. My first death—the death of innocence.

II
Motherhood The moment I realized that something was alive inside of me was the moment I became consumed with death. My body, previously small, compact and efficient, began to swell and contort like the bloating of a corpse. Every few weeks I would spread my legs for a man who had no real interest in me. He was only interested in this person deep within me whom I had never met. My appetites, which I had always satisfied with carelessness and abandon, were no longer my own. I didn't recognize my body. I didn't recognize its desires. The way I moved through the world changed. I became cautious and afraid. Every crosswalk, every staircase, every preservative, every loud noise was marked with a skull and crossbones that only I could see. Friendships withered. Activities that I had thoughtlessly filled my days with began to seem impossible and terrifying. People stopped seeing me. They only saw the increasingly convex part of me that was home to someone else. I moved through the world like a ghost. I couldn't find myself in all of the appointments and vitamins and clothes that no longer even pretended to fit. I couldn't find myself in all of the late night fears. In the end, lying on a bed covered in blood and mucus and sweat, the feeling that my life was over calcified into a small stone of certainty. I was gone, the person I knew as myself was dead. And then he came, rising up out of this horror of fluid and panic. This little stranger, the most alive thing I had ever seen, and I began to see that small dead stone as something else. It wasn't me that had died over those long months. It was my selfishness, my conceit. The wheat had been separated from the chaff and washed away like the vernix from the creases of his tiny eyes.

III
Always thought loss of mobility was scariest…having used my body in so many different ways, as an athlete, yogi, traveler, BUT it was actually… It was very hard when my partner got such that he wasn’t available for physical touching. We’ve been together 38 years and he’s a lovely man and I never wanted a different man and he wasn’t ever going to marry anybody but I’d lived in Germany where there were partnerships like that and it was ok with me. But he just won’t even hug me. I guess that was the worst transition for me. Even the no sex was not exactly a problem for me, a lot of women feel that way, ya know, take it or leave it, when they’re older at least, but the no hugs and the not sleeping on the same bed was just very hard on me. I consider that the hardest time of my life.