On Christmas Eve, we went to my Dad’s grave and sang over his bones. Nothing about that sentence sounds right. How can my Dad have a grave? I still smell whiffs of his cologne around my house. I can still hear his voice on my messages. I can still imagine every crease and freckle on his big warm generous hands. He shouldn’t have a grave.
He should be in a palace eating ice cream and marshmallows, but he would hate a palace. My Dad always said his idea of heaven was a river of whipped cream and him swimming through it with his mouth open.
If I think back to his happy spots, I would say heaven for him was sitting on the balcony outside our motel room in La Jolla with his binoculars. He’d happily sit for hours watching the sea, hoping to see a peek of a seal or a whale. Every so often, he’d report what he was seeing, “Marci, you oughtta come look at these seagulls. I’ll be damned if that one isn’t telling jokes to the other one.” I peer at him. Is this another of his little pranks? Like telling us to watch out the windows for honk birds, and then honking the car horn when we weren’t looking? Or trying to convince us on our road trips through farmlands that the miles upon miles of hay bales we saw on our trip were actually not filled with hay at all, but with horse eggs.
“Dad, horses don’t lay eggs.”
“They sure as hell do,” he’d say with a completely straight face, so convincing I watched out the window to see if I could spot a horse egg, even though I know horses didn’t lay eggs. And when I turned my face away from him, another honk bird would fly by. He passes me the binoculars and I look out at the San Diego sea and sure enough, one of the gulls looks like it’s talking and the one next to it looks like it’s laughing.
I love San Diego. It’s where my parents met, and I love to picture my Dad stationed there in the navy as a handsome young man. I like to imagine him meeting my Mom at the USO dance. She liked to tell us that all the girls were chattering and swooning over the handsome new cadet from Utah. She purposely ignored him, and then she felt a tap on her shoulder and his deep booming voice asking her to dance. She said when she heard that voice, she couldn’t believe he was talking to her, and she melted. They went on a date the next night to a drive-in movie. She said he was sitting on his side of the car, and she really wanted him to kiss her, so she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. She said his arm whipped around her so fast, pulling her close to him. They were married nine months later and never spent a night apart over sixty years.
But now he’s laying in the very cold hard ground, or at least his bones are, and she’s lost her mind and lives in Memory Care.
Every Christmas Eve, my sister, Maria, and her husband go to visit her mother-in-law’s grave to sing her Christmas carols so she won’t be alone. This year, Maria wanted to go sing to my father.
Ugggghhhh. I couldn’t imagine why we would do such a thing. It sounds nice in theory I suppose, but I can’t imagine spending Christmas Eve standing out in the cold in a graveyard. I begrudgingly piled my kids into the car in a cold dark rainstorm. My stomach clenched when I turned into the cemetery. I pulled around the corner and stopped the car behind my nephew. Our two cars were the only cars in the cemetery.
I can’t imagine why it’s not popular to spend Christmas Eve in graveyards. Stand out in the cold on such a magical night with a bunch of dead people? Come on!! It’s FUN!! But if you think about it, there is a long history of Christmas and ghosts, i.e.. the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Scrooge. (If you like the idea of ghosts on this particular night, read this article by the fabulous Alcohol Professor.) https://www.alcoholprofessor.com/blog-posts/those-old-christmas-spirits
I sighed, stepped out of the car, gathered up the candles and linked arms with the kids. We trudged up the hill in the rain to my Dad’s headstone and stood there, using our wet mittens to shield the flickering candles from the rain while wrestling with the floating lantern, trying to unfold its delicate paper. My nephew, Jackson, kneeled in the mud, trying to light it, but the rain was making it impossible. While we waited for the lantern to light, I played some of my Dad’s favorite songs, put my arms around the kids and Maria, and we all sang along: The Gambler, In the Ghetto, Lucille, Silent Night. The lyrics “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” have a whole new meaning when you are not thinking of a baby in a manger but standing over your beloved father’s grave with hot tears streaming down your cold face.
I didn’t want to think about what his remains might look like under that cold hard ground, but I know he has to be bones by now, right? It’s been two years.
There are many ancient legends about singing over bones, a metaphor for calling that which looks dead back to life. Using your voice, your breath, your attention and energy, to surround those bones with sound.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the Jungian analyst and wise storyteller, tells the story of La Loba, an ancient mythical Pueblo woman, who lives in a cave and searches the desert for bones. She gathers up all the scattered bones and slowly and carefully assembles them them on the floor of her cave, until the bones take on the shape of a wolf. She then lights a fire and sings over the bones until they take on blood and flesh and finally spring up and run out of the cave, taking the form of a wild laughing woman.
People talk a lot about this myth as a story of a sacred journey, a metaphor for a creative soul awakening, gathering pieces that look dead but only need warmth and breath and music in order to come to life and take on a new joyful form.
This myth strongly resonates with me at the point in my life. I feel like I am existing in an alternate universe of grieving that could be compared to a desert.
Certainly divorce is like a desert—bleak, dry, relentlessly scorching, with certain parties acting like cacti, prick-like really—stabbing me with their needling ways, drawing blood every time I reach out my hand for connection. And of course, there are those times when certain parties act stable for five minutes, and I think maybe we can proceed from here in a peaceful way, after all, I dearly love so many things about this certain party, and I feel a moment of calm, running towards the oasis of peace, only to find it’s a mirage and there’s just an ugly old komodo dragon snapping there, waiting to bite off my toe if I come too close.
I used to tell my bestie, Kim, that it was so devastating to lose the emotional support that comes with marriage. I keep wanting to call my ex and tell him something funny the kids said, or something I’m worried about. Wisely, Kim said, “Marci, don’t call him. You are going to the hardware store for milk. There is no milk at hardware stores. He won’t give you connection or support, and frankly, he barely did even while you were married. For connection, for emotional support now, you need to come to me, or to someone else, but don’t go to him.” She was right, like always. I wish I could call her now.
Death and divorce make everything feel chaotic and dangerous. Primal instincts and overpowering emotions power through me, knocking me off my feet, despite my best efforts to remain poised and in control. Their sheer force demands that I place my trust in their intensity, allowing them to change me, to change everything.
The old self has died, and it’s time to gather up the bones, the scattered bones. Hey! It just occurred to me, La Loba sounds a lot like the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris! Osiris was killed by his jealous brother, Set, and his pieces were scattered all over. Isis loved her husband and she went and gathered his pieces in order to create a new life, their son Horus. I always viewed the story of Isis as a story of inspiration and creativity, breathing life into that which appears dead. When I belly danced, I had an Isis costume created for me with massive golden wings. The bra and belt were golden wings wrapping around my hips and heart, and the skirt was made to look like layers of shimmering golden feathers. A lotus flower centered the back of the belt, right at my sacrum, and it had a lotus flower crown. Every time I did my wing dance, I would pretend I was fanning the audience into creativity and inspiration and golden light.
But, I am terrified, even though I can’t imagine the woman in that Isis costume with golden wings being terrified of anything. That woman is me! Pull yourself together, Marci!! You can do this! Sigh. If only it were that easy.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes that in archetypal symbology, bones represent the indestructible soul. She writes, “You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt and scar it… but it does not die, for it is protected by La Loba in the underworld, she is the finder and incubator of bones.” And isn’t it interesting that the way La Loba breathes life into the bones is by singing?
Coincidentally, I took a voice lesson today, my first in more than twenty years. Like most humans, I love to sing. When I taught at a Waldorf school, they told us that the human soul is made of music, and that is why people respond in such a powerful way to music and why it hurts so much when someone tells us to stop singing. I sang when I was young, performing in many musical theater shows in LA and occasionally at restaurants after a few glasses of wine. But I could never afford real lessons, and I tend to get so nervous when I sing, that I lose my breath and then my sound. Without breath there is no sound.
But I happily sing to myself all day every day—in my car, in the bathtub… and nearly every night I sit down at my piano and belt out a song before bed, at least I used to before my heart was broken and singing left me weeping over crossed arms on the piano keys.
So a few days ago, I stood by my piano as my voice teacher said, “You have been shut down since the divorce.” (True, but how does he know?) “It’s time to let it out, let it all out.” I say, “I am afraid I’ll sound like a lonely dying dog howling on a mountaintop”. My teacher says, “It’s okay, I’ll only laugh a little.”
I am nervous. I don’t want to do it. I know I’ll sound terrible. He starts to play scales and I push aside my fears and sing. He coaches me over the scales. “Open the back of your throat and sing like you are yelling at the kids at the other end of the house.”
I try. My throat feels tender and raw.
“Open the back of your mouth!” He shouts over the piano.
I try to open my throat, although I’m not really sure what that even means.
He nods encouragingly. “Now, more breath.”
I open my mouth and let the breath out of my open throat as I keep singing the scales higher and higher.
“Louder, higher, more breath, GO FOR IT!”
I go for it. The breath and sound pouring out of me, not like a lonely dying dog, but like a strong powerful wolf howling at the moon, like La Loba singing for her scattered bones, like a waterfall of golden light, louder, stronger, tears pouring down my face, happy confused tears because I can feel my bones springing to life. My throat no longer hurts and I’m hitting notes I’ve never hit before with a force I’ve never felt before. I sing and electricity sparks up my spine and out of my head, filling the room with my voice.
I want to fall on the floor and weep, but I stay poised, taking in the overwhelming feelings and turning them into sound.
“Singing over the bones. Singing over the bones.” Like lightning bolts of energy.
Would that I could sing Kim back to life, my Dad back to life, my marriage back to life.
In the graveyard on Christmas Eve, the lantern floats for a moment before the rain takes it down. But we don’t need it. Our love for my Dad is a lantern that will never go out. I play Danny Boy as we walk back to the car. My sister yells at me, “Are you kidding?!” Danny Boy makes her sob, so I turn it off and put on the Neverending Story instead, and we all sing and dance back to the car.
