The Actual Dance is a play that is based on my own experience facing the death of my wife to breast cancer and presents what happened to me as I realized what I might have to do – hold her in my arms as she took her last breath. Spoiler if you don’t already know, Susan is an unlikely survivor.
I usually write about the difference between those who are privileged to be with the one they love as they die and those who instead get the phone call or experience sudden loss later in my October Blogs.
Today it feels right that instead of the standard blog around Breast Cancer Awareness Month with a Statistic, a Task and a Resource about breast cancer, I offer this reflection on the underlying journey, the ritual of The Actual Dance.
At this count it is nearly 60 souls lost and those who loved them are now engaged in the end-of-life ritual of The Actual Dance. The ritual of confronting and reconciling with the loss of someone you love. And for those hundreds of people still in the hospital, well their loved ones are engaged in the ritual as I describe it in the play itself – anticipating the unthinkable loss of the person you love. Both journeys are I have learned among the most difficult and unthinkable moments in life.
Two Poems.
The first written in July 2016 after a number of shootings, called Bang!
I usually write about the difference between those who are privileged to be with the one they love as they die and those who instead get the phone call or experience sudden loss later in my October Blogs.
Today it feels right that instead of the standard blog around Breast Cancer Awareness Month with a Statistic, a Task and a Resource about breast cancer, I offer this reflection on the underlying journey, the ritual of The Actual Dance.
At this count it is nearly 60 souls lost and those who loved them are now engaged in the end-of-life ritual of The Actual Dance. The ritual of confronting and reconciling with the loss of someone you love. And for those hundreds of people still in the hospital, well their loved ones are engaged in the ritual as I describe it in the play itself – anticipating the unthinkable loss of the person you love. Both journeys are I have learned among the most difficult and unthinkable moments in life.
Two Poems.
The first written in July 2016 after a number of shootings, called Bang!
Bang!
Our love so deeply entwined
Bang!
We each are one another
Bang!
An equal half of our whole
Bang!
Then a giant hole explodes
Bang!
And rips us two asunder
Bang!
Our love so deeply entwined
Bang!
We each are one another
Bang!
An equal half of our whole
Bang!
Then a giant hole explodes
Bang!
And rips us two asunder
Bang!
The second written after Newtown, called Hollow
Hollow
The dance that one day each and every one of us will dance
The orchestra that forms and plays only when it is needed
A wonderful and intimate and beautiful goodbye.
Instead! The music stops. Suddenly without warning
This dance takes only an instant
A lifetime in the Universe
The ballroom sits achingly, intolerable empty, silent
Almost in black and white
Hollow
The dance that one day each and every one of us will dance
The orchestra that forms and plays only when it is needed
A wonderful and intimate and beautiful goodbye.
Instead! The music stops. Suddenly without warning
This dance takes only an instant
A lifetime in the Universe
The ballroom sits achingly, intolerable empty, silent
Almost in black and white
Hollow
The core of The Actual Dance is the idea of what love really means and offers that it is a spiritual relationship between two individuals that connects them in an unbreakable bond. And when the bond is broken it tears half of what we are away – “asunder.” We are left half of what we once were experiencing the world as Hallow.
What I have come to understand that there is a place and a time in the future where we who survive will come to understand that we can live productively even with that empty cavity. Perhaps it gets filled back up a bit with new love. In any case, we go forward eventually in the world different, with a new understand and purpose, perhaps driven by our dreams of what would have been and now see can hopefully be, but differently.
© Samuel A Simon and The Actual Dance LLC. All rights reserved
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