Birthday / Deathday

Forgive any typos.

Today is my dead mother’s 80^th birthday. If you haven’t read the eulogy I wrote for her, I think it’s worth a look because it’s a pretty fine piece of writing if I don’t say so myself. It’s called Grief Also Means Losing Something or Someone You Never Had (but always wanted).

Since my ma died in November of 2023, I’ve grown to appreciate her more. I realized how much alike we are especially in the realm of aesthetics and art, and how we see through (most of) the bullshit. The main difference maybe is that I haven’t allowed the passed down family mental illness to completely sabotage me. Yet, anyway. I will say though, she used to give really good hugs and I wish I had savored them a little more.

There was a time when you gave me incredibly warm, all-encompassing, chest to chest, hip to hip, soft, nurturing, safe, beautiful hugs. Hugs that felt like home, hugs with no duration to them. Where we both instinctively knew when to release from the embrace. Then the hugs didn’t feel like that anymore, became something different. Suddenly, they had a pre-determined shelf life, felt detached, were released on your terms without any of the same resonance that I had experienced before. I walked away with a broken heart and a clear message that you were questioning your love for me. It was all in the quick release, triggering abandonment. Before you died, the previous version of our hugs returned. For that I am grateful. It felt like forgiveness.

I’ve been noticing this pretty intense feeling of longing today, maybe for the past two or three days. Tonight, coincidentally, I’m leading a post-show discussion about death after a performance of something called, Remember You Will Die at Farm Arts Collective in Damascus, PA. I’ve been procrastinating this week about what I should say but I woke up this morning and spoke into the voice memo app on my phone after a kernel of something came to me in the shower. The following is an edited version of what emerged. Imagine me, a towel wrapped around my waist, walking around my house speaking into an iPhone 13. Sometimes this is just how inspiration works folks!

Death Talk

I woke up this morning feeling a little better. Yesterday I was feeling nauseous and shitty all day. I forgot that today is my dead mother’s 80^th birthday.

And I didn’t sleep the night before because I was so deflated after being told at a town planning board meeting that they wouldn’t approve my proposal of building an outdoor stage on my property due to some vague zoning issues. It sucked and it’s a long story so I’ll spare you the details but gotta say there’s some real irony when it comes to the law.

Obviously, there are bigger fish to fry in this crazy mixed up world.

So much darkness producing so much anxiety.

There's so much fear going on in the world right now.

So much uncertainty.

I get into these conversations, and some of the conversations are just purely about, you know, how horrible the world is, how horrible it is that there’s a genocide going on, mass death, people getting killed, people politicizing people getting killed. People politicizing free speech. On and on.

I mean, it's just like this endless daily cycle of just one thing after another. Horror, really.

And so, you begin to feel that in your body.

You start to wonder when do you start taking care of yourself and when do you start living your life? And you start to wonder, how can I be of service to others.

And I start thinking about these conversations with friends who are having a horrible time at theirs jobs or in relationships or just struggling to keep their heads above water and, you know, it's like, yeah, it all just sounds like a microcosm of everything else going on. Someone might be complaining about their job and then I'm suddenly complaining about mediation and all the injustices that go along with a no fault divorce. And it just becomes this downward spiral of doom and gloom.

And then, of course, no wonder I felt shitty yesterday. Of course, I felt sick, right? I mean, I'm feeling it in my body and my body is sending me messages like, shut the fuck up Josh, I mean, please!

And since 2022, I've been dealing with chronic pelvic pain and abdominal pain and penis pain. And it's just like, you know, the sky sort of fell at one point back then.

I started with this experience where I had this mushroom trip, and as a repercussion of this mushroom trip, I felt existential dread for months and months and months. I didn't know why, and then I realized it was going back to my early childhood complex PTSD and the absolute terror I felt when I was a pre-verbal infant and so all this stuff was coming up, and the world was imploding and then I got diagnosed with cancer and then my marriage was falling apart. And so finally, I exploded in the garden because I discovered my wife had pulled out my pumpkin plants. I asked her not to touch them, said she needed to thin them out, and she was probably right but she pulled out half my pumpkin plants even though I pleaded with her the day before, please don't do that. She did it anyway. And I exploded. I screamed, “I don't need you anymore”. Of course, that led to our divorce, which is still in the works, but I guess what I'm getting at is, life is the full catastrophe and it's full of uncertainty and everything that's going on is getting in the way of presence and day to day living.

You with me so far?

So, for the last year or so, what I've been doing is practicing presence. And when I first got diagnosed with cancer, I reread a book called When Fear Falls Away by Jan Frazier. Now, Jan Frazier wrote this book when she was scared that she had breast cancer, and she was going for testing, and she had a lump and all this fear about dying. Turns out she didn't have cancer, but she wrote this book, and you know, at one point, I read it and I thought, well, yeah, that's a great book, but it didn't really speak to me in terms of what was going on in my life at the time. So, I reread it as I'm sitting there on my bed the day I was supposed to be getting a call about my diagnosis, so I thought this is fitting. I'll read this book. And I reread it in one day and it was very helpful. And then I got the diagnosis which was cancer but low level, non-aggressive prostate cancer just so you know I’m not looking for any pity here. I’m okay and maybe even more than okay. But I was scared shitless at the time and I didn’t know what to do. I was alone, by myself, nobody was with me, most conspicuously not my wife. And so I freaked out and at one point during the initial freak out process I decided that I wanted to meet Jan Frazier, so I set up a phone call with her and apparently that's what she does. She does these consultations with people who are scared. So, I had this conversation with her and you know what? She's just like you and me. There was no magic bullet, no magic cure for the fear I was experiencing. Yeah, she said that, you know, her fear just fell away. Lucky her! But basically, what that meant to her is that she's just living her life in presence. So, I said, okay, so I guess that’s like the main thing here. The key to the whole magilla.

And then I started writing and writing and writing and writing about it, and I started a Substack and I just started writing about all this stuff, and then I found this guy, Michael Brown. And he wrote a book called The Presence Process. So I did the Presence Process once. It was great. Then I did the presence process again. It's a 10 week practice. Okay, so here I am, practicing presence. And then I realized that’s pretty much all there is to it. And yet every day, even today, even yesterday, all that, all the layers of anxiety, all the layers of fear of what's going on in the world of uncertainty, it just hits you, hits you over and over and over again. And you know what I realized? I realized there's only one thing left to do. It's to learn how to die. It's to say to yourself, and I used to say this in jest, because one of my favorite movies is, Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman. Old Lodgeskins, his grandfather, who was a Cheyenne brave, chief of the Cheyenne tribe, played by Chief Dan George... He would say, "It's a good day to die." And there was a time when I started saying that after my cancer diagnosis. It's a good day to die. It's a good day to die.

And so now, I'm arriving back at that idea. Shaking hands with death is the key to life, because think about it, you hear all these stories about people on their death bed and they're like, oh, if only I'd done this, if only I did that. Oh Jesus, oh God, oh Allah, I know now It's all about connection and love and being surrounded by people who I love and who love me and redemption and forgiveness and all these things, blah blah blah. And generally, that will happen for some people on their deathbed. I don't know about all people. I don't know if it'll happen for Donald Trump, for example. But there you are on your deathbed, with all the answers to life, and then all of a sudden… Okay, check this out, I've had two near death experiences, so all of a sudden all these great drugs, oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin and all these wonderful drugs start pouring in right at the end. And man, it’s such a high, and you start floating above your body, and you're looking down at things, and you're like, oh, wow, this is beautiful. God, Jesus, Allah, who cares! This is pure bliss. Everything's okay.

Well, why can't we just feel that right now, in our daily lives? Why can't we treat each other with forgiveness, redemption, acceptance, connection, love and service right now in our day-to-day existence?

There’s another great movie. It's called Zorba the Greek and it’s also a book. You can read the book. You can watch the movie. You can do both! So, okay, there's this very uptight British guy named Basil and he's going to Crete to help the community there do something. I forget what because it's been a while since I've seen the movie. He meets Zorba on the ferry over to Crete from Athens. And they get into a chit chat type conversation and Basil asks Zorba at one point, "Are you married, Zorba?" Zorba goes, "Oh, yes, boss, I'm married, I have a job, kids, wife, the full catastrophe.” And Basil's like, "Whatever, dude, you know, go have another beer." But they become friends. And at one point during the movie, Basil watches Zorba doing, you know, the Greek dance. I can't remember the name of it at the moment, but he does the Greek dance at a party. The sirtaki I think. And Basil’s watching him dancing and going, god, why can't I be that free? Why can't I be that uninhibited. Why can't I embrace the full catastrophe? Why can't I embrace uncertainty like Zorba? And so basically, the plot goes on and they decide they're going to help the town build this contraption to bring logs off the top of the mountain down to the village so they can, you know, build this community center or whatever. I don't remember the exact thing, but so they build this whole pulley system type thing and they get the whole town involved and everybody's doing it, and it's great. And then Zorba fires off a shot and they put the first log in there. They're watching this whole thing happen and so the first log comes down and the contraption gets very shaky. Second log goes in, it gets shakier. Third log goes in and the whole thing falls apart. The full catastrophe. Everything is over, kaput, even after they put weeks into this thing with all this people power, et cetera. And the whole thing falls apart, and Zorba is down on the beach, and Basil comes and joins him, and Basil, I mean at this point Zorba’s expecting Basil to be angry with him, you know, because clearly he fucked up the whole deal, you know, the whole contraption, and because it was really his idea, he feels a little guilty like he's a big screw up or something. And Basil just looks at Zorba on the beach, and they have this moment. It's the final moment of the film. Final scene, and Basil says to Zorba, “Zorba, teach me to dance.” And so, guess what? They dance together on the beach after this whole thing falls apart. They do the sirtaki, I guess. And they’re laughing their fool heads off about the whole thing and I think they eat some lamb or something but that’s it, the end. And that's life, and that's death.

So, I put it to you, are you scared to die? And if so, why? I want to hear the depth of your fears and your anxiety. And I want you to ask yourself, "Is it worth it? Is there something that I can be doing differently?” And I'm not talking about politics. I'm not talking about Democrats and Republicans. I'm not talking about any of that made up shit. I'm talking about is there anything we can do on the inner to change things from the bottom up? I'm gonna put this out there before you chime in, I think the first step is to shake hands with death. So now, I turn it over to you. Let's hear what you have to say.

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