The Dance of Life (Excerpt)

         I watched my instructor dance with no music once. Her ballet was flawless, with perfect extensions and graceful, sweeping arms. I can only describe the dance as eerily beautiful. “The music,” she told us, “is something you can find inside.” This search proved to be the most difficult for me. The songs I attempted to play in my mind would skip beats or require too much attention, leaving my dancing awkward and clumsy. The beat found only in silence eluded me until I was seventeen, when the music found me.

         I was staring into the face of a man I didn’t recognize. The laugh lines were nearly invisible in the pale, taut face, and his silver hair was combed too perfectly. The serenity was a lie. As I stepped away from the open coffin, I let the past weeks rush over me: his pain, his weakness, and his release. There was no soft goodbye, no peaceful slumber; the entire thing had been an excruciating process for all of us. The meeting and greeting of family members whose faces and names blurred together had taken its toll, and I entered the sanctuary equipped with a numbness I had wrapped around myself. As the service progressed, however, I began to feel sparks—the first, when a distant family member remarked how “frail” and “old” he appeared.  Suddenly, I was thrown back in time and I could feel the wind slamming into my face, whipping my hair around as he spun me on his shoulders. Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies. I clapped my hands and called out in giddy glee, “Faster, Papaw!” Wrapping my legs tightly around his tall, sturdy frame, I prepared myself as he laughed and began spinning faster. I didn’t think of him as an adult, he was just like me—he wanted to be free. Around and around we went, and I was no longer a five year old, stranded at the waist-level of the adults who peered down at me; I was flying. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.

         Jarred out of my flashback, I found myself back in my seat where the cloying scent of flower petals seemed overwhelming. The indignation burned in my chest as the preacher sorrowfully continued, “let us remember Bill as he was.” Something lit inside of me, and I immediately resented the saying. Not who he was, who he is. So vivid in my memories, I could still picture the old sweatshirt he always wore: the golfing one, with all of his grandchildren’s names printed on the tees. As the oldest, my name had been the first one printed. Four other names had been added since. I could easily conjure up the image of him at my dance recitals, wearing a broad grin as he presented the single red rose. I could see the same UT sweatshirt he wore every Christmas, hear his voice as he sung in the choir every Sunday morning, smell the mix of cigarettes and mint gum that filled the car when he picked me up every Thursday from dance class. He was still a person; he was more than someone who was. There was fire in my lungs and a hammering in my ears, as memory after memory shot through my mind. Then, I was there. As my instructor had promised, I could hear my own beat. It wasn’t a song I had heard on the radio and memorized, or my favorite track on a CD. It was an internal rhythm I felt with every inch of my body. So intense, it became more than just hearing a beat, I could actually feel it pulsing through my fingers and up my neck. I held on tightly to the sensation until it became familiar, attaching itself to the face etched so clearly in my mind. Any memory I was willing to fight for, I could dance to. That is how you dance in the silence.