I’ve been filled with a poignant melancholy these days, reflecting over the past year with my heart as mirror. It’s almost breathtaking — this year everywhere I turned there has been a death: my best friend’s lover died of bone cancer; my brother-in-law’s mother died peacefully in her sleep; a member of our theater company lost her mother to cancer; an old friend from work died suddenly of a heart attack in her bathtub at the age of 48. An old work comrade finally succumbed to her years-long bout with pancreatic cancer.
The realization of the closeness of these endings shocked me. I’ve been clawing through this year like a coal miner, watching the signals coming from political, artistic and social spheres for what was to come, what was to be done.
Yet, as I plowed through this year cognizant of what was going on around me, I never gave myself emotional time for processing what was happening in my life. The emotional impact on me was not expressed, afraid that once I started grieving, I would not be able to stop. Time this year was not a linear progression of days, but a broad ballroom of change dancing around me, with death taking partners close to my most inner circles. It was an expression of Totentanz — the Dance of Death.
On a larger scale, this was the year that witnessed the beginnings of the end of an era, and the birth of something new yet to be fully defined and named. Imagine this: over forty years ago the rise towards America’s current conservatism began, accelerating around the time of the Nixon ascendancy, and building to a head after Watergate, and the Ford and Carter presidencies. A recession hit the economy, plunging the market into its first big crash since the 1920s. An anti-tax movement in reaction against government was fully underway.