what happens next

Death rides in on his black horse, gathering up everything that isn’t nailed down.

Death comes in like a tornado, pulling the roof off the last remaining structure of who you thought you were, scooping up the sound of your newborn at your breast, the sigh of your lover as you turn to him under the full moon, every memory, every pleasure, every pain whipped up, swirled into fog, into foam, released from the confines of flesh until you are light, moving towards more light and a sound that can only be described as love.

But sometimes Death stops short, waits at the outskirts of the town that is your body, waters his horse, leaves out some hay, waits and watches as you age, as your body changes from maiden to mother to crone.

Death sat next to me yesterday as the eye doctor told me the glaucoma in my left eye had progressed rapidly, alarmingly, and that untreated I would go blind.

The options were all grim. Surgeries with two months recovery, outcome uncertain, or new eye drops that would turn my green eyes brown.

I came home in a daze. Why do I care about my green eyes turning brown? He said my eyelashes will grow longer and wouldn’t that be nice? No. It wouldn’t. Only 2% of the world has green eyes I learned today, teetering between taking the damn drops I picked up from the pharmacy this morning, and googling alternative therapies.

I want to take a selfie of my eyes to paste in a scrap book. See. Here. They were beautiful. People noticed them. Me.

Death clears his throat, pats his horse that is restless, wants to pick up the passenger and be gone. Not yet, he soothes, not quite yet.

So you’re wondering what to choose…going blind or having brown eyes?

This sounds absurd. A no choice choice. A choiceless choice. Yeah, I say belligerently, I’m not sure.

I pace, I sulk, I eat chocolate. What’s happening to me? I ask Death. He smiles a small, sad smile. You’re dying, he says, and I marvel at how kind he can be at times like this, how gentle with me at my worst. Not dying dying, he clarifies, but you’re dying a small death, your vanity, your sense of who you are and what makes you a special human being. What if instead of clinging to what makes us special, people were willing to let go of their green eyes or their fabulous hair or singing voice or the energy of youth they danced with? What if they did it willingly, with grace, and found relief from the constant insistence of the self, the demand to be seen, accomplished.

What if we gave in and gave up gently, let go, opened our fist, bent our knees to the ground, softened our gaze. What if we let our hearts break from these losses, let ourselves die to who we desperately thought we needed to be. What if we welcomed the small deaths, the water wearing away at our outer shell, our vanity, all the versions of ourselves we’ve cherished as unique all these years. Nothing left but our authentic being released at last from the confines of our own prison.

I am finally silenced, stilled, the child in me no longer raging and whimpering. I am letting what no longer serves me fall away and return to the earth in this season of change, of days growing shorter and nights growing longer, surrendering to the the cycles of birth growth harvest and rebirth. I am practicing dying, hibernating dreams that are telling me about my longing for connection, for rest, for nourishment, for my yearning to live in the place where spirit meets bone, radiant with laughter, whistling to ravens, filled up to the brim with love.

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You can read more stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging availablae on Amazon