practicing endings
by Leah Wilks
What does it mean to attend to the dissolution of a thing as much as the making of it?
On a webinar with writer and teacher Frank Ostaseki[1] he asked this question: how do you attend to endings? How do you end your day? A project? How do you leave a party? How did you learn to do this? Who taught you? Is it working? How you end something determines how the next thing begins.
To say that this is a moment of endings would be a gross understatement. Endings happen all the time. Big, small. Mundane, catastrophic. Right now is heightened. Ways of life are ending for many of us, capitalism seems to be in some form of death throes, and many people’s lives are ending – sooner than they thought, in heroic and tragic and completely avoidable, and thus more tragic, ways.
How we die matters.
Who dies matters.
How we acknowledge death matters.
Death is revealing.
When I make dances I want the endings of them to be meaningful. I want the fast blackout, the sudden inhale of the audience, the ‘i-don’t-have-words-but-I’m-feeling-something’ accolades afterwards. I suppose this is how I’d like to die too. I think it’s how many people want to die – with meaning, with purpose, with reflection, not hooked up to a breathing machine in a hospital or killed by the deeply embedded racism that permeates our country. And yet (even prior to this pandemic) that is how many of us in the United States do die.
We want to believe we will be the exception.
Everyone dies.
Everyone dies.
Everyone dies.
SCORE FOR CONFRONTING THE INEVITABLE
Find a space on your own. Walk the perimeter, or the margins. With studios and common spaces closing left and right, this might be your roof, a corner of your bedroom, a spot in your backyard. Outside is preferable, but indoors will work too - especially if you can see out a window.
Find a location. Root your feet. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
Put on a piece of music in your headphones that is ambient/driving/rageful/sorrowful/what you like.
Begin to rumble.
Feel how this is different outside of a studio. [in my case the roof is uneven, i have to shift my feet]
Let your attention wander. Follow planes/birds/the skyline.
Notice what is blooming.
What is still in winter.
Who has their windows open, who is watching tv, who else is on their roof.
If it is cold tighten your jacket down around your face and let it be cold.
If you are sweating, feel it drip down the small of your back.
Shake off like an animal.
This is a fearful time.
It is okay to be scared. And it is okay to feel things.
If you weep - fantastic.
If you laugh maniacally - fantastic.
Look to the graveyard, to the hill, to the buildings, to the silver of the roof coating, to your busted shoes.
Remember that we have always been here in this moment doing this.
Take comfort in what connections you find, let time become uneven, send your spells.
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I come across the trace of the juice first. A puddle, sweet, sticky. A river. A lake. Splattered across the space. I follow the curve of the river, the cutbank, the silt deposit. Here is a body. Here is the flesh spilling out. Here the rind has been torn. This is a body. An orange. A body. I imagine my body, soft, vulnerable creature splattered on the asphalt. I imagine her body as the train made impact. The squealing of the wheels trying to brake. Her friend crushed in a moment. I imagine his body as the snow separated. As he was carried down the mountain on the last ride of his life. Soft soft body. We think we are hardened rinds – our skins keeping us together.
I am stuck on the floor at eye level with this orange. With her body. With his remains. How do you grieve when the body is gone? There is a part of me that still doesn’t believe it. That other reality where they are just on vacation. Or that they are in the space with me all the time. Timeless beings. They whisper down in the wind. Swaying pine trees. That space between the base of my skull and the back of my ear lobe. That’s where they live now. I want to go back and tell them I love them one more time.
Getting to say goodbye is such a gift. An honor above any I could have imagined. A practice I want to pretend I will never need.
I pick up the remains. I want to preserve them forever – I understand the desire to do so. And then I squeeze them in my tiny fists. To let the juice run down. To move out of the visual, out of the imagining and into the present, to get the tactile feedback that I am alive.
Years ago, burnt out after making my first big evening-length show, a friend mentioned to me that she saw me putting so much effort into the making of the thing but so very little attention into the ending of it. She offered that perhaps I needed to ritualize the way I came down from a show as much as the rehearsals leading up to it.
I think that many of us choreographers spend most of our attention on the building of the thing, and very little attending to the ending of it. My first year of graduate school a professor of mine (Jennifer Monson) asked me about this: what would it be like to make a piece specifically for the point of letting it decay? What would it mean to take all the emphasis I normally put on the beginning and middle stages of the thing and attend to its dissolution instead?
I made a piece where I added 5 “moves” a day – no repeats – get your impressive “big moves” shit out of the way first. It became a document of those two weeks. Then I gave the material in small bit-by-bit pieces to a bunch of different dancers – undergrad students, fellow graduate students, professors. I taught it to them once, and then at the end of two weeks I gathered them all together and asked anyone who wanted to share what they remembered. I thought that maybe this was a way to let the material go. To see what else it could become. To give the memory of it over to other people’s bodies. and now as I’m writing this I realize that this is perhaps how I think about what happens after I die as well – that the part of me that goes on beyond my physical body is what is housed in other people. There was frustration from some folks about not getting it “right,” or not being able to remember “correctly,” or worrying they hadn’t made it interesting enough.
And to this, I now think. You are doing it exactly right. What you remember is perfect. (it is of course flawed – that is the beautiful thing about memory – it is only the memory of the last time you remembered it.).
I think we all need help with endings. With how to let go. Some of us still have community for this, proscribed practices given to us by a church, or a belief system. But for the secular ones like me we are often left to our own devices – to take all of our best improvisatory skills and figure it out as we go along.
Can we practice small endings so we can better attend to the big ones?
SCORE FOR SOLITUDE
Lie very still and feel your heartbeat in your stomach.
Move as slowly as you can – with the greatest of care.
What is this roll of my skin? What are these fingers? Where did the space come from?
Find a path. One shift at a time. Remember Deborah Hay and turn your fucking head.
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Grief. Solo. don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it. Stay awake late at night because only when you are truly alone at some odd witching hour and the veil between here and shadow reality is t h i n does it rise to the surface and find space to come out.
[On page 13 of the brilliant naturalist-memoir H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald writes: “Here’s a word. Bereavment. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.” I know this to be true. And yet I wonder if it might be different.]
I am small, exhausted, worn out. There is not enough of me to produce a solo. I want to lie on the floor in one position until I feel like moving. I may never feel like moving. Moving alongside you makes moving feel possible again. I trust you have my back. We have been through a lot together, long before this moment arrived. True grieving may only happen alone, but knowing that someone else is going through it in close proximity takes the edge off of the danger, off of the I-may-never-get-off-the-floor-again.
[“The Western funeral home loves the word ‘dignity,’” writes Caitlin Doughty in her book From Here to Eternity. “The largest American funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality. Wakes last exactly two hours. Processions lead to the cemetery. The family leaves the cemetery before the casket is even lowered into the ground.” Doughty brings the discussion of death out into the sunlight, and offers examples of other cultures that do death differently. I devour her writing like a starving creature – joyful that I am not crazy and not alone in wanting to have a different relationship to death.]
I’ve had a lot of people die in my life. Some of these barely affected me. Some of them shook my world to its core.
None of these were at the hands of police. None of them were killed by other people (at least not intentionally). There’s a privilege in whiteness and money and the era I live in as a Jewish person, a woman, a queer, and it shows itself not in the number of deaths I have experienced, but in the ways in which these people I loved have died. Is it a privilege to die by accident?…to die painlessly?… to die on your own terms?…to die without violence?…to die surrounded by those who knew you? So much of our society’s underpinnings and defining power structures are illuminated at this moment of transition - at this moment that many of us would rather pretend wasn’t a part of life.
When teaching, I tend so much to the ritual of building a class. I care about endings. We always circle, we often try to clap once all together. I cannot figure out how to care for endings on zoom. How the fuck do you clap once all together through a screen? So I am forced out of my normal role of ‘holder-of-space’ and instead into trying to offer a simple reminder to make your own ending. To come back to your body in a 360 degree manner. To not get trapped in the frontal and visual. To access your other senses. To practice your own ritual.
Practicing endings is anarchy at its best, I think. I don’t mean only the image of anarchy – protestors toppling police barricades – though that is often necessary. I mean instead the less obvious actions of mutual aid, stepping out of capitalism to take care of each other, prioritizing horizontal power structures kind of anarchy.
It is a refusal of constant-growth capitalism. Capitalism can’t stand endings – unless it can make a funereal industry out of them by convincing you that these are things that you don’t want to see – that a dead body or grief or passing is unsightly, unseemly, uncomfortable and that you should really just leave it to an expert. We used to do these things ourselves – but many of us in the “American Dream” have become quite removed from this part of the cycle.
Capitalism is based on never-ending consumption. On progress. On the next best thing. On creating want and need so that I feel that I need to do these things to keep up. To stay in the game. We know in an ecosystem that constant growth and constant use leads to extinction of one thing and overpopulation of another. nothing can grow forever.
This pandemic is forcing us into a hard stop. And for myself I think starting to practice smaller endings (and perhaps some bigger ones) gives me the space to grieve and then maybe move into something different. But I can’t get to that something different from here. From still trying to engage in the same way.
Folks around me (artists, school teachers, baristas, dancers…) are starting to reckon with this depletion - the exhaustion that this hard stop is now allowing us to recognize. They are wondering: ‘how can I go back to that [job, schedule, not feeding myself well, miniscule amount of pay, burn out]?’ They are starting to get pissed. To realize that the folks that actually have their backs are right around them – they are not their bosses, or their government officials – they are family, biological and chosen. They are wondering: what if I just didn’t play this same game of lack any more?
[the one thing I remember from the two permaculture classes I took when I lived in Oakland as a 22 year old is that attending to your soil is the most important thing you can do for good plants. All the sun and water and organic seeds and attention in the world will be meaningless if your soil is depleted.]
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We are practicing dying. We are practicing attending to the dead. We improvise as we go, making up the ritual we need. All of this is a part of a workshop with performance artist Keith Hennessy. He explains to us that he developed this dying practice after years of having to figure out how to care for, mourn, and bury the dead members of his queer chosen family. As a gay, male, artist at the height of the AIDS crisis, many of his friends were dying at an unprecedented rate. Many of them had been disowned by their biological families, and in the culture of mass hysteria that surrounded the AIDS crisis many of the traditional institutions that provided care for the dying (churches, doctors, families) refused to do so. The task was left to friends, partners, brave nurses – in short: chosen family.
Keith leads us through disrobing the body, washing it (in all of its crevices and folds) – he reminds us that bodies release fluids when they die, that death is often quite messy -, cleansing it spiritually in some manner (whatever that means to us), and preparing it for viewing by the rest of the community.
For some of us, the practice is about understanding the performativity of funereal practice. For others it is about creating a ritual that employs the absurd, the humorous, even the grotesque to make a work of art that eschews reverence to tradition when it comes to the dead. For my small group, it becomes a symbolic ritual to grieve all of the actual people we have lost in our lives that we have never been allowed to publicly keen over. Perhaps we are not as avante-garde and interesting as the other groups in our ritual and our preparation of the body, perhaps we are a group of tender-hearted sincere folks, perhaps we have all lost too many people to take even a symbolic ritual like this lightly. We wrap Lucas in a sheet and use lots of lavender to decorate his body. One of the Danish folx teaches us a song to sing together over his body. And then we all, each and every one of us even though we try to hide it, start crying.
Later, when Lucas “wakes up,” he tells us that he felt both incredibly cared for by us, and that he knew he also served as a stand-in body for all of the other people we had lost in our lives. The care went both ways.
Two weeks later I attend my uncle’s memorial service. We are at a golf club. The body isn’t present (he had passed months earlier), everyone is dressed in stuffy suits and dresses, and the atmosphere is all-around awkward. As people stand up to share stories about him, I realize that nobody (except for perhaps his wife and daughter) really knew who he was – the stories are not about his personhood, only about various things he did or accomplished. The contrast between being at this “real” funeral that feels so highly performative and fake, and the “fake” funeral that felt so viscerally real is unsettling for me.
Have you noticed yourself paying closer attention lately? To watching the waves of different kinds of flowers and plants bloom and die?
I have always said I would like to slow down. To acknowledge these cycles and shifts in space. And yet I haven’t. I haven’t slowed down, I can preach about this and then I am still embedded in the reality of making money to pay a Brooklyn rent and taking class and eating enough and having health insurance, let alone leading a meaningful life.
We are so conditioned to believe we are worthless unless we’re getting ahead.
Perhaps endings, stillness, sitting in the uncomfortable unknowingness of things is an important protest of refusal. A chance to say, we have to do this differently.
SCORE FOR EVENING
When the sun goes down.
How do you greet the ending of this solar day?
Take a minute (or twenty) to transition into the absence of daylight.
Light a candle, or read a poem,
or sit quietly and watch the light remove itself.
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My mother and I have driven down Borland road to visit Marie. She is two days from dying, she hasn’t eaten for five weeks, her mother’s ghost came to her this morning to rock her – though even saying this she feels a bit self-conscious, embarrassed, cognizant that the knowledge of a person on the edge of life might sound crazy to someone in a less mysterious place. She is ready to die. She tells us that she loves her family, her friends, but she is ready to go…she has been ready for a while now. She is scared of the tumors pushing on her esophagus, she is scared of not being able to breathe at the end. My mom, ever the practical doctor, assures her that won’t happen – that there is morphine to make her comfortable, that there will be oxygen, and a nurse, and family.
We sing to her. Christmas hymns. O come O come Emmanuel. Lo How a Rose. Silent Night. I am struck by how important this private kind of performing feels. Way more important than any other singing I’ve ever done. I knock over her water glass. Steve goes to get towels. I am distinctly aware of the sweat in the small of my back. She and I share the same birthday. I tell her that on September 12th I will celebrate for the both of us. I tell her she should try to be there. She laughs and says that she thinks that kind of communication skill might take a while to master.
Her funeral is in a church down the road. It is sunny after days of rain. There are piles of food (chicken wings, ham sandwiches, sweet potato biscuits) and lots of music. My parents and I start the service singing I’ll Fly Away. We have practiced for hours and hours and hours. The song is too high for all of us, but my mom does not want to learn it in a different key on her banjo so there. At some point while we’re practicing earlier in the week I laugh, imagining Marie looking down on us obsessively trying to perfect our harmonies. ‘It’s just my funeral you guys. Don’t worry, you sound great.’
It is a church, a sanctuary, a monumental space. Symbolic and quotidian all at once. The extravagance of this life passing. The normalcy of death.
So what is ending in your life? What are you grieving? It can be tiny or huge. It may feel insignificant – but instead of comparing our plights with another’s could we view our particular loss or grief as a chance to practice endings?
To return to Frank Ostaseki: how you end something determines how the next thing begins.
If we don’t attend to our endings – if we don’t acknowledge them as such, if we keep pushing through, hoping for a return to normalcy – nothing gets to turn over, to decompose, to fertilize something else.
And if you feel like something is germinating deep inside you – so deep that you can’t even get a sense for its shape – don’t pull it out into the light just yet. Some seeds wait for years for the right conditions to emerge.[2]
Instead, build your soil.
By building soil, I don’t mean self care. I don’t mean bubble baths (though those are great) or yoga. I mean….shouting. I mean going slow. I mean sobbing under the covers for hours. I mean taking a nap because we’re tired. I mean saying no to zoom calls with the best of intentioned friends if we don’t have the energy. I mean dreaming. I mean attending to the ugly parts of ourselves that are coming to the surface that we don’t have our normal coping mechanisms for. I mean taking time to stare – at a wall, at a bird, at a crack in the sidewalk, at our own palms, and letting ourselves be curious (not for a product) just for ourselves. I mean letting things end – and acknowledging these endings before we try to determine how the next thing begins.
[1] Frank Ostaseki co-founded the Zen Hospice Project in 1987 and teaches extensively about end of life care. I got to attend a webinar with him on March 18th, 2020 through my participation in the New York Open Center’s Integrative Thanatology Program. For more information on Frank and his book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully go to: https://www.mettainstitute.org/Fbio.html
[2] See Hope Jahren’s book Lab Girl for more detailed information about this.
Leah Wilks is a queer, southern, dancer, musician and writer currently working in Brooklyn and North Carolina. Her work revolves around memory, memorialization, death and dying practices, and the creation of monumental spaces through movement. She also spends a lot of time working with elderly folx and growing green things/digging in the dirt, as well as maintaining a long-distance duetted practice with collaborator Mauriah Kraker [for more of that work: www.bestlastdances.com]. www.leahwilks.com
headshot by John Haas
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