What a dance weekend taught me about living with grief
Dancing, life chapters, and matryoshka dolls
I danced all weekend. Barefoot on the wooden floor of the village hall we twisted, turned, leapt. Each 5rhythms wave a moving meditation, dancing us from one state to another. Flowing circled my feet to find expressions in staccato, the wild dance of chaos emptied my mind so the patterns of lyrical could lead me into stillness. And again. And again.
The dance workshop began at 5pm Friday. It was Sunday afternoon. Yet another wave brought us to stillness. I lay flat on the floor and thought, “I can’t dance another step.”
The music continued. I lay still, denying it. For a whole track, I refused to move. The next tune added a delicious melody and my toes began tapping and my fingers played piano on the floorboards and I laughed at myself as I lay there.
The next track layered beat and melody and I watched myself in disbelief as I rose to my feet and gently swayed. To the next tune, an old favourite, I abandoned myself to dance, as if it was Friday night not Sunday afternoon. As if I was fresh to the floor, not many hours deep.
And I felt it. How life cycles. It doesn't stop. Even when you’re lying on the floor resisting life with every bone and sinew, the music plays on, until one day you’re humming along and your toes are tapping and life picks you up and puts you back on the dance floor even when you thought it was impossible to ever dance again.
As dance moves in waves, life moves in chapters.
I can mark phases of my life when one story ended and a different story began: jobs, relationships, homes, cities, adventures, achievements, choices, and losses.
Sometimes a new chapter arrived so gradually I didn’t notice. I woke up one day and realised everything had changed. The story I thought I was living was over, and a new one had already begun. Like the time a relationship drifted from love to indifference.
Sometimes a new chapter arrived with fanfare or thunderclap: a joyous meeting, a choice, or a sudden loss. Like the day Andy walked onto my dive boat, or the day we married, or the day he died.
Sometimes I knew I was walking through a defining moment in my life, and sometimes I had no idea.
Still Life, the novel by Sarah Winman, is a glorious tale of moments lined up across decades, mapping the life chapters of Ulysses Temper, Evelyn Skinner, and the people they love and lose. It is magnificent.
As I romped through the decades, from 1901 to 1979, from Florence, Italy to London’s east end, I felt life’s tectonic plates move Ulysses and Evelyn from one chapter of their lives to the next. Sometimes events beyond their control washed them into a different phase: a world war, a disastrous flood. Other times, a split-second decision, a fleeting moment, a random meeting with a stranger on a rooftop, profoundly altered the rest of their lives. Sometimes, a year or two was summarised in a sentence, the uneventful middle of a life chapter.
Having zoomed across seventy years in just a few days, Still Life inspired me to think about life’s patterns and shapes, the dance of life’s chapters.
I think moments are like matryoshka dolls. Each moment is a doll in its own right. But when we look back, and place moments in context, trace connections to other moments, we can find the stories of our lives, lined up in hindsight.
We can’t see into the future, but we can trust that one day, we’ll be able to look back and see the pattern, find the story, look into the eyes of one tiny matryoshka-doll-moment and see the others lined up behind her.
When I look back on my ‘grief chapter’, I see how many losses are lined up like matryoshka dolls.
Andy died in 2019, and then a multi-year season of loss tore through my life.
First, the loss of my life partner and the fundamental altering of every aspect of daily life. Then, the fraying of life rooted in “us-ness”: shared hobbies that no longer bring joy, favourite places, special dates, once a source of happiness, now a grief landmine. Creative projects, livelihoods, entire careers, gone. Parts of my identity, who I knew myself to be, gone.
Conversations with other young widows show this to be a common experience. It’s not always this way, not for everyone, but a season of secondary loss is common.
I came to realise this was my winter, a hard prune of my selfhood, leaving behind only the truest parts of me, the nub of self that would carry me forward, the stump from which I would one day grow new life chapters.
Widowhood is a long winter and at times can feel like the White Witch’s Narnia: “always winter but never Christmas”. Grief does not preclude joy forever, just as winter does not preclude sunshine. Even on the coldest days, sunlight on snowflakes can dazzle us with beauty. Grief turns joy bittersweet; it has taught me to how to feel sadness and happiness at the same time.
My 5rhythms dance teacher said, “If we keep moving, things change.” There is trust at the heart of this idea. In recent months, new things have arrived in my life, green shoots are unfurling. I sense a new life chapter.
I will always grieve Andy. I will never “get over” losing him. I will never “move on” from our love. I will carry Andy in my heart until the day I die because his love transformed me, as the loss of him hard-pruned me. I am learning how to grieve and grow at the same time.
I started a new job recently. I’m working on an interesting project with lovely people and I’m enjoying it. As I focus on my work project over the next few months, I plan to change the frequency of my Substack posts to once a month. I’ll see how it goes.
When I dance, stillness births flowing; the end of one wave leads to the beginning of the next.
It’s the same with life chapters. Each creation holds the seeds of its ending, and each loss carries the seeds of renewal.
The music plays and if we keep moving, things change - even when we think it is impossible to ever dance again.
Beautiful as always. So happy for you to be starting a new chapter x
The circumstances are different but what you write, so beautifully and profoundly, speaks to my heart too. 'The thunderclap' of sudden change, the imperative to keep moving, however slowly; the ongoing bittersweetness of happiness and sadness felt together.
Thank you so much for sharing. It helps more than you know. And I will be adding 'Still Life' to my reading list. This last month, I have found myself able to read again, to lose myself in someone else's story for a short while. It feels precious.