A few days later I received an email from a former high school boyfriend’s wife that after successful back surgery he had collapsed in his hospital room and medical personnel were unable to revive him. We had recently reconnected through the Internet and exchanged a series of emails. A couple of days before his wife’s email, I had received an envelope in the mail from him with a photo of the two of us, fifty years ago, formally dressed for a school dance. His comment, “Where did all those years go?”   

Yesterday, a friend left a message on my cell phone. A mutual acquaintance, probably younger then either of us, is in her last hours. She had been fighting cancer but the call was a request for prayers to help her cross peacefully. I could respond to that request. As a mother of two adult children who have predeceased me, I have had the honor of being present at this ceremonial time, and I know it to be holy. In fact, when death comes too swiftly, it can be hard to not have the time to say goodbye.

We don’t admit it often out loud, but death is one of life’s few certainties. It’s lessons include an encouragement to savior life, every beautiful, terrible moment of it, and to learn to dance with the uncertainty of when, as John Donne suggested, the bell will begin tolling for thee. 

It was a trek, as all spiritual journeys are, with five of us traveling six hours from Pittsburgh in my SUV. The Serpent Mound is in southern Ohio, not far from Cincinnati and my friend Vikki Hanchin’s recent book, The Seer and the Sayer http://www.amazon.com/The-Seer-Sayer-Revelations-Earth/dp/1452557276 told of her experiences there. So twenty or so of us set out to see for ourselves this jewel of Midwestern archeology. A world-class expert on the 5 to 6 thousand year-old effigy mound, Ross Hamilton, would be meeting us there.

After the final hour’s roller coaster-like approach over hill and dale, on serpentine curves through fields and farms, Vikki’s stomach was talking to her, but not in a good way. Once we arrived, another passenger, a Reiki practitioner, began working on Vikki but each time she relaxed into the process she began to cry. It became clear she was tuning in to a sorrow beyond her own skin. When she told Mr. Hamilton of this, he shared that a few minutes before, he and his wife had learned of a dear friend’s daughter having been killed the previous night, crossing the highway near the Mound. A few minutes later when we began preparing for our Serpent Mound ceremony Vikki suggested, “We can help this family with our prayers,” and this death of a child shaped the ritual we were to do at the site.

One of the participants, a Mohawk grandmother and friend of the family, taught us the chant her people sing to assist someone in their crossing. We began chanting to the young girl whose life had ended, suddenly and prematurely, the previous night.  As the ritual progressed, I began thinking of the girl’s mother and grandmother, and, having lost two of my own adult children, I felt called to do something for them. I brought to the group my need to call the names of these women, now in the midst of their unbearable loss.

I thought of what had helped me to heal and I taught the group a dance and chant developed by my Texas women’s spirituality group.  The movements begin as a spiraling of the hips, rocking back and forth as women do when comforting a child on their hips. “We are women, we grow out of the earth; beautiful, powerful and wise.”  The movements in the second verse repeat but the words change, as they did when I accompanied my friend Rose at her crossing. “We are women, we go back to the earth; beautiful, powerful and wise.”

After completing the chant and dance I felt a strong reassurance in my body that my book, currently in press, Warrior Mother, Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and Rituals That Heal would be helpful to other families dealing with grief and loss.    

Ever since coming down the stairs to my studio on the lower level and being greeted by water pouring from two light fixtures in the ceiling, tests and challenges to my character have abounded. Learning to sleep while fans the size of airplane propellers ran night and day to dry out the damaged wood, followed by weeks of waiting for insurance estimates and ordered materials to arrive. The workmen have been as polite and unobtrusive as possible under the circumstances, but I’ve been relegated to finding workspaces in various places around town. A senior center down the street hosted our improv troupe rehearsals for several weeks, and friends graciously allowed me to camp in their spare room when the paint fumes and disarray got the best of me. I’m told we’re nearly to the end of this destructing and constructing project but checking in with my insides, it’s clear my belly doesn’t believe it. 

Sitting in my upstairs bedroom, which is now the sum total of my living and working quarters since the floor refinishing crew has taken over the downstairs, I’ve thought of the quality of  “flexibility.” Being a dancer I’ve always thought of myself as having perfected the ability to bend and stretch in many directions at once but this experience has been showing me, I’m not that good at it. Especially when the impetus for such movement is coming from something outside myself and leaving me with not much ground to stand or sit upon.

There have been some humorous moments. One night we actually watched television seated on high kitchen stools in the living room in order to see over the stacks of furniture piled between the sofa and the screen. I’m sure I  overreacted today when my husband told me the floor might need one more coat than we’d planned on. I saw what I aspire to and how far I am from it when I read the late Everett Dirksen’s description of himself. “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

 The dance craze of the early 1980s was the Hustle, (think Saturday Night Fever). Margaret was a hip grandmother as she moved onto the dance floor stepping on every beat of the music. Her shimming fringe-layered red dress provided a still remembered dramatic image as she and Jim became the center of everyone’s attention.

At that time in our community, in order to ballroom dance frequently, you needed to be a member of a ballroom dance club that rented a hall and a band once a month. In order to be accepted as a member, you had to have a sponsor and fill out an application detailing what dances you and your partner were proficient in. Margaret was a member of two clubs and she agreed to sponsor us. At that point in our dancing career we did what could be called “fake dancing,” walking or stepping to the music and imitating what the other more skilled dancers appeared to be doing. “I hope we don’t embarrass Margaret,” my husband said as we filled out the forms.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that, in our 30s and 40s, we were among the youngest of the dancers. “These people have discovered the fountain of youth,” I said as I struggled to keep up with dancers a generation or so older than myself.

 Years later, in studying how the body influences the mind, now called, “Embodied Cognition,” I have come to understand why dancing helps keep us not only happier, but smarter. Our brain constantly rewires its neural pathways as needed. And dancing requires and creates new pathways, building in a redundancy that overcomes brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. 

A 21-year study of senior citizens, 75 and older, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, set out to see if any physical or cognitive activities would influence mental acuity. The only physical activity they found that made a difference was frequent dancing. The study did not say what kind of dancing but Robert Powers, a dance historian concluded that these people would have been doing social dances learned in their youth, like swing, foxtrot, and waltz. These partner dances involve split second decision-making, which is part of what creates new neural pathways. And according to Fred Astaire, who advised dancers to “Cultivate flexibility,” by blending with their partner, dancing provide opportunities to learn socially from others. http://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/smarter.htm

One summer, getting the basement sorted out so I could teach dancing there, we discovered a box belonging to our father, filled with memorabilia from his college days. This provided a gold mine of information about parts of his past he never spoke about. From his photo albums we learned he had performed in a theater troupe, and since my brother and I were involved in theater and dance, we were shocked that our engineer father had never seen fit to mention this to us.

Recently I learned of a study that demonstrated strong benefits to children when they know about their family history. A team of researchers at Emery developed a “Do You Know? Scale, which was a series of 20 questions for children to answer about their families.  Questions such as; Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

http://shared.web.emory.edu/emory/news/releases/2010/03/children-benefit-if-they-know-about-their-relatives-study-finds.html#.UUdCq47xgTM

The results showed that the more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. Even if the family narrative is not all goodness and light, the fact that family members overcame challenges in the past says to the next generation, you can do so too.

Knowing that my mother was sent to take care of her grandmother when she was a small child helps explain my mother’s and my own sense of the importance of care-giving roles in families and communities. Knowing that my father was a thespian helped me to see that people are not just their job or professional roles. We all have many dimensions and hidden talents to discover and explore.

I loved getting confirmation for the important role elders and their stories play in a family and for the next generations. Since one of the most important things for children to know is a family narrative that shows they are part of a larger big body, one that has survived to this point, and likely to do so moving forward and beyond.

Looking over at the bird feeder I discovered it was empty, and being the kind of mother I am, I thought the cardinal must be hungry. I felt a bit surprised that he would know enough to signal me to fill the feeder, but that seemed the only possible explanation.  I mentioned this to my husband and he said we were about out of birdseed but he found some and put it inside the feeder and around its edges as well.

In a few minutes the cardinal was back, but he paid no attention to the feeder. He went straight for the window, and looking directly inside he resumed pecking and waving his wings. Native Americans speak of animals as totems, teachers, who provide wisdom or what they call “medicine” to us humans if we only carefully observe their behavior. Frustrated by trying to figure out his message I Googled, “why is a cardinal pecking at my window?” An entire stream of comments was uncovered dealing with this exact situation. In 2009 someone wrote, “I have a bird feeder outside a large window facing south. This one particular cardinal keeps peeking into my house.”  It turns out this is a common problem caused by the fact that cardinals are quite territorial. In the reflection of himself in the window he perceives another bird and he is trying to frighten him off by this intimidating behavior.

So what is the wisdom to take from this cardinal’s behavior? What medicine does he offer for our life and times? Again a visit to the web produced some suggestions – “True to the fire of his color, the crimson cardinal has got some major spunk. He will aggressively defend his territory, and fight attackers with ferocity. Indeed, they have been known to fight ghost males (their reflections) in mirrors for hours on end.” http://www.whats-your-sign.com/animal-symbolism-cardinal.html

Perhaps the message for us humans in all this is that, though courage and tenacity are important virtues, we must be careful that the attacker we are fending off isn’t just part of ourselves. As that famous comic strip wise man Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

“That’s great Ken,” I told him. “What did Dad say?”

 “Just proves you could have done it all along.”

This answer shocked me at first. But after a few moments of reflection I thought, how like Dad. All “A”s were the minimum expectation, not seen as the spectacular achievement they truly were, especially for someone that had a lot of catching up to do in order to get there.

Fast forward half a century, and as my father’s daughter, you’ll find me holding myself and others to the most demanding of standards. And now that technology is involved in nearly every task, I bring those expectations to the computer, its  software, our phone systems. My knee jerk reaction when something fails to work is to assume I must be doing something wrong.  In the past week, I had emailed and tried to call a non-profit organization in my community. After several tries with various methods of communication I discovered that their phone didn’t work, their fax didn’t work, and their system for making decisions, once they got my service request, was slow and most unresponsive.

A different email exchange with a business collaborator demonstrated that he must not have taken notes on our previous phone conversations, because misinformation abounded throughout our email exchanges.

So things go wrong often. Currently I am waiting for a plumber, having discovered that water is dripping from the light fixtures in my dance studio on the bottom floor of our house. Getting names of a plumber from several friends, and having none of them available to help seems to indicate that many other people are experiencing water damage emergencies – failures of equipment, maintenance, or design.

My husband has offered the suggestion that, for my own peace of mind, I not expect things to work. Then when they actually do, I can be pleasantly surprised.  

In a recent column, Maureen Dowd raised the question, “Why can’t filmmakers tell the story as it actually was?” Lamenting the creative license taken in Oscar nominated films, she objected to the fabricated car chase in Argo, done for dramatic effect, and the historical inaccuracy of the voting process for the 13^th amendment in Lincoln, done reportedly for simplicity sake.

Creative non-fiction writers have been dealing unceasingly with the issue of truth, since their motto is “True Stories, Well Told.”  In finishing my mother’s memoir due out this summer, I recognize I’ve learned a great deal how complex truth actually is. In my family, as most likely in yours, people who were present for the same events have quite different perspectives on them. My book, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss, and Rituals that Heal tells events from my perspective. My daughter’s then 12 year-old son, her husband, or my son’s stepfather would each have their own views of the events we all shared. As a social worker, I know it’s not productive to ask who’s right? Everyone is right from their own perspective. In literature this is called point of view.

In my retelling of events I discovered that I sometimes misremembered details. An email exchange with my son-in-law resulted in some fact checking on some items I got wrong or didn’t give the emphasis they deserved. And any telling of a long complicated story involves selecting what to include and what to leave out. This selectivity becomes by its very nature, not telling the whole truth. When given the assignment at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival to write a scene from the perspective of someone who is likely to see it differently than me, I discovered that there was a previous scene to the one in question that I hadn’t included. From my perspective it wasn’t important. But telling the story from this other person’s perspective, meant the previous scene had to be included. Later, I decided to leave it in because it added a rich layer to the story.

“Truthiness,” Stephan Colbert’s made up word is defined as something that feels true, intuitively, without regard to the evidence. In spite of it’s being all in fun, I think he’s on to something. In a radio show recently I heard Maya Angelou say that truth is not the same as facts, and that in some instances, facts obscure the truth.  Since the meaning of a communication is in how it is received, I like the notion that feelings are facts too, just a different kind.  

Then there are the secrets withheld, to protect the innocent, the guilty, or to maintain peace in the family. I wrote a paragraph that involved my son but when I shared it with him he said that wasn’t what he said. His denial did not convince me because in my training as a therapist I was taught to write my client notes so carefully that when called upon to read them out loud in a courtroom under oath, I would feel confident of their accuracy. But whether he said it or he didn’t, I took it out and replaced it with another truth we both could agree on.

In addition to the stage where dancers from the August Wilson Center performed, and hundreds of women danced Debbie Allen’s Break The Chain, another corner of the square contained a tent the size of a solitary confinement space in a prison. The construction held artwork and petitions to obtain release for women incarcerated for defending themselves against the violent acts of intimate partners. A candled altar space occupied another corner, a place for remembering women from our community who have lost their lives to violence, a resource tent offered information about organizations addressing this vital issue, while the Comfort Tent offered support and respite for anyone strongly affected by this topic of violence against women.

When I shared information about this event with Coke Nakamoto, a dancing social worker friend in California, her comment said it all. “Absolutely love the consciousness brought to the Pittsburgh event. What vision and understanding of the bigger dance beneath the dance!”  No wonder I feel so honored to take the over 15,000 steps my fitness tracker counted that day, (three times the national average) to support these women in bringing their vision to such a spectacular reality. 

My friend Pam got an electronic activity tracker for Christmas, and like I’ve done with other good ideas Pam has, I decided to copy her and get one too. My husband got a different brand and we’ve been testing and comparing our models. Both offer feedback on how many steps we take each day, the number of stairs we climb, the number of miles we walk, and the number of hours we sleep. Mine even calculates how long it takes me to get to sleep. Using the numbers that are calculated, our trackers estimate the number of calories we’ve likely expended, based on our age, weight, and height, information you put into the system when you set it up. I’m sure motivations to use these systems vary but here are some of mine.

• Monitoring the progress of one of my most important goals, to move more. I’ve read about the health risk of inactivity as we age and no longer do work that requires physical activity and effort. As a writer, spending long hours everyday at my computer, I don’t want my obituary to read, poor dear, she died from sitting too often and for too long.

• A reality check – I wanted an objective measure of what I actually do, because my own perception is not always reliable. Some days a mile walk in my neighborhood feels easy, but on other days it can feel like a hike up a steep hill.

• Rewards – The five year old inside me still likes some version of the gold stars and “good job” my teachers wrote on my school papers. Knowing that my tracker is noting the steps I climb encourages me to climb more of them. It feels like I’m getting credit for my efforts.

• Learning something I didn’t know – When I saw the estimation of calories I used during my eight hours of sleep, (420 or so), I thought the instrument must be broken. But checking on line, turns out we do use calories while we sleep. And maybe I use more than some other people because I get up often to go to the bathroom, and I turn from side to side fairly often during the night.

• Accuracy – Sometimes my instrument doesn’t recalibrate correctly, when it switches over from daytime to nighttime analysis. Waking in the morning with the report that I have walked 400 steps in the night (which has happened) gets me to wondering if I walked in my sleep. I know how many steps it is from my bed to the bathroom and back, so that information is not likely to be accurate. Starting off the day with 400 steps gives me a head start on the number I hope to do each day. But I don’t need help in cheating; I can do that all on my own, without any help from a technological accomplice.