Death Rehearsal

When my mother was dying, I learned a lot about signs of departure. Hospice-nurse friends knew physiological signs could be deceiving, given their fickle ups and downs. I recall the time, weeks before her actual death, the breathing and heart-beat slowed so alarmingly that we called children home from school to hold the vigil around the death bed. There we were,  counting her last breaths, only for her to pop-up rigor-mortis style, eyes full of fire, to ask us what on earth we were staring at. But the day she was ready to relinquish her stuffed cat, the cat that I’d given her to replace her flesh-and-blood cat during a stint in the hospital,  we all knew she was ready and would slip through the veil.  “Here, take this,” she said to me one afternoon when I least expected it.  I looked at Rossie the nurse who looked back at me, eyes shining. I looked at the cat with its stitched blind eyes and well-handled mats of fake fur.  “This is it,” we all knew.  Her last thing.  Her letting go of her last thing.

My mother’s blind cat haunts me as I go around the house handling one bauble from my life after another, trying to decide what to give away, what to keep. I tell Julie on the telephone that this move is the ultimate Feng Shui, my giving away everything, but then think, no, death is the ultimate Feng Shui. This is just a rehearsal, a mini-death, a lesson in letting go that no doubt reaches deeper than any other letting go I’ve been called to do in my life; but it’s not the ultimate letting go, not yet, not this time (at least I hope), though I do wonder if there’s really a difference. I believe that death is just a matter of taking off the old coat of the body and stepping into an adjacent room. What I’m doing may be harder than actual death, because I still must drag along at least a few heavy things, which means I must circle-in-the-square them into two not very big suitcases. 

The new suitcase helps, my new vessel, the new Merkaba of my worldly goods, my pyramid-tomb of tokens from this life that can accompany me into the Norway-hereafter. The pristine teal-ness of its interior exudes a kind of magnetism that sends off sparks should I offer it something not worthy of perpetuity. The white Keds. I love the white Keds. But the suitcase sputters and sparks, my hands flinch against what I call “dryer static”—those surprising little shocks that happen when you pull things out of the dryer (not that I have one), but here putting the wrong things into the suitcase creates the static, the little shocks.  “The new soul taking over your body does not wear white Keds,” the suitcase tells me. How does it know this? I sort of collapse. 

One by one, I must relinquish the things I’ve arranged around myself to offer myself some semblance of worldly permanence.  The Deruta china pattern I decided to invest in as I learned to marry myself—one cup, one plate at a time, hand designed by Helena, the colors I chose, the design she saw in me—yes, it goes.  The food dehydrator from my raw-vegan phase, the yogurt maker, the Wok, the collection of ceramic sautee and sauce pans—must go.  The carpets (puppy pee-stained, not worth keeping anyway)—straight to the dumpster. Table clothes, placemats, napkins, silverware, wine glasses—deep, narrow and fluted, can’t take them with me. I have a stereo and CD’s—music goes on iTunes, the stereo who knows.  Flat screen television and DVD player plus DVD’s, my entire Almodavar collection, complete seasons of “Six Feet Under”, and “House”—all available to the one willing to drive to Spoleto and haul them away for me. 

Books are hardest, of course.  For the moment, I’ve decided I am allowed to take enough books to fill the little suitcase. This is ridiculous, given my need for shoes, but there you have it—priorities.  Yet how do I truly know what few book-wrapped thoughts are worthy of staking my life on, when life itself is so unknown. I hold each book up to the open mouth of my suitcase, which turns into a kind Bocca della Verita'—a mouth of truth. According to the Roman legend of this mouth as oracle, you put your hand into it and make a statement.  If the statement is not true, the mouth bites your hand off. If it is true, you withdraw your hand and move forward in peace. Somehow my suitcase works contrarily to the prototype Bocca, only the books it eats will leave me intact, let me move on.

prototype Bocca della Verita'

What worries me is how easy it is to pack the non-essentials. Earrings, for instance, take up so little space that I suppose I can dump my whole collection in a side pocket and spare myself the sorting of lentils from the grain, but somehow to evade even that minute handling of detail promises disaster. This is psychometry after all, this scanning of everything with the palm’s dousing beam.  Who knows what power Grandma’s cameo earrings wield, having lived wired to her earlobes all those years, clandestine parasites of the energies surrounding her.  No, I must stand as vigilant as the grim watcher of a monitor at the airport security check; everything must pass through the scanner, the kirilean screen.

Here I stand in the dumping grounds of my lost life, seeing truly a landscape of obsolescence, of broken dolls and tea-cups half buried in the compost of other disintegrating things, and think:  Mission almost accomplished, this mission of non-attachment to anyone or anything. But then, as always happens when one thinks one has arrived, the body playing possum springs to life.  “Are you still looking for work?” a man’s voice reaches me via telephone, a man I do not know who seems oddly familiar with me. “Would you be willing to move to Torino?”  Certain choices do not require one to risk one’s hand in the Bocca della Verita.  Torino? Anna Bossi lives in Torino, not that this man who is calling me even knows Anna, or a thing about my work with her or my plight to fly back and forth to Torino when so often there is no money to do so.  Suddenly my material life experiences a kind of rapture:  the Deruta pattern, the feather bed I’ve slept under all these years, the TV I bought just recently when Italy went digital, at least three cartons of books, my teal suitcases and five dogs spontaneously leap into the back of the Green Suburu I find myself driving up the A-1 toward Torino.

Who’d have thought my Merkaba would morph into a green Suburu?

"I'm not surprised," grins the Magus Anna Bossi.