Looking Death in the Eye, and Making Music

Effie: Chapter Three

I have fallen short this year. You can read last week’s post about The Agony of Not Being Able to Do it All. Or you can notice that this is the first year in almost a decade that I did not throw a big Sager Mosaics sitewide Holiday Sale. I went to California instead, which is a pretty good trade. My trip will result in a beautiful new online course being launched soon. I cannot wait for you to see it.

In lieu of offering carefully crafted mosaic art for you to peruse and purchase, I am offering you a rare opportunity to save on a paid subscription. I call it the 200th Post Offer, because this post, the one you are reading right now, is officially my 200th piece of writing on Substack. There is a lot going on in the Substack Universe these days. It is stretching its wings, growing like a baby dinosaur, soon to become the brontosaurus of the publishing world? Maybe. New York Times reporters are leaving and coming to write on Substack! It’s where all the smart people are hanging out and the fact that you are reading this makes you smart too. Choosing to pay to subscribe gives you the key to The Archives of those 199 entries of The Ruins story.

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Some chapters in The Effie Memoirs will be different than others. This is one of the different kinds. My great grandmother doesn’t make an official appearance in this chapter, although she is there, between the scene, behind the song. If this is your first introduction to Effie, you can listen to my special read aloud of Chapter One just below. Each chapter builds on the last, so reading in order is best.

After I grew up and went away to school, I finally met the people who feared death.

You may wonder, doesn’t everyone fear death? No. Not everyone. I come from people who sing about it. Tell stories about its most intimate details. People who seem to grow stronger in their acceptance of its coming. I come from people who have long ago chosen the flowers and the hymns for their send off. Hydrangeas stolen from the neighbors’ gardens; Amazing Grace sung by the congregation out of the hymn books. Those are serious requests that I may be responsible for organizing.

Fearing death takes odd forms. People who look away at the mention of a funeral. People who toss twisted word salads to shield a child from the death of a pet. The ones who go under the knife to hold off the wrinkles, wanting to soften the lines that point toward the end. Cheating, gambling, drinking, anything that helps massage away the sharpness of the one big, looming truth. We’re all gonna die.

A new corner of writing at The Ruins. More details to come…

Side note: It’s a fine line, easily crossed over, between not fearing death and courting it. I aspire to the former while knowing dear ones who live in the latter. The gift of not looking away can become a curse of not being able to look away.

But back to the people who don’t fear death. There is a peace about them. The ones who are confident about where they are heading next. “Let The Lord take me when He’s ready, not when I am.” That kind of thinking has gone quite out of fashion, although I am noticing a fascinating return to it lately, in certain circles, and I am there for it.

The Appalachian culture, forged from long centuries of hardship, built people used to living without much cushion between hot and cold, dark and light, sweet and bitter. Like their Irish and Scottish ancestors, they leaned into the pain with heartbreaking music. They chose not to look away, but to look deeper.

There are songs.

There are songs that, when heard early enough in a young life, have the power to help you decide who you are. That song for me, the one that sent me the message that death was right here with me, watching, was sung to me by my mother and her mother. Always together, their only instruments their deep Eastern Kentucky inflections, an accent I was not born with and have not mastered. They sang this song to me on quiet porches and bedtime tuck ins. I had no understanding of how music culture worked. I didn’t know that this song that made me cry for the first time in anguish for the story of premature death, had made countless others cry too. It was written for the crying.

Passed down through our family from memory, it pulled real tears from me every time. Still does. And my matriarchs wanted me to cry. Not with cruelty in their hearts. But with realism. And an embrace of the struggle that is life. And then death. They chose not to look away.

Take a few minutes to listen to this version which is the one that hits the closest to my family’s interpretation. Songs like the two I share below are a fragile language, kept alive purely through real life moments. The more deeply we become immersed in the virtual, the more important a simple song, sung to you by someone you love becomes. I find myself seeking them out.

Put My Little Shoes Away

The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection - Missouri State University

There is a difference between the horror film obsession with death, the zombie and chainsaw and Halloween kind of death, and the simple acceptance of death as a part of life. Desensitized violence has twisted our relationship to this most sacred part of a long or a short life; its ending. I much prefer, ache for even, these versions of personifying death, accepting its inevitability, and welcoming it like an old friend who you had almost forgotten was coming to visit. A good death, they used to call it. The Japanese, the Native Americans, many of the warrior cultures understood this.

Listen to the clip below for a haunting example of talking to Death. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time.

We don’t get to choose the time. We don’t get to choose the manner. But we can work on the readiness. For most, but not all, readiness takes a deep belief in a higher power. The more specific that power, the better the readiness.

I will end with an ending. My grandmother at 99, in her bed at home surrounded by dozens of family members. A woman of great drama and beauty, a lifetime performer who loved an audience. At her last breath, someone clapped (shocking!) and then suddenly the whole room burst into applause. A real response to a real crossing over.

I call that a good death. I choose not to look away.

Thank you for being here with me as I keep digging for optimism.

Some days with a hammer, some days with a shovel. And some days with a pen.