50. THE COMMUNE PARTIES WITH DEATH

     May you fall in love with the Angel of Death. 
                       -- Yiddish curse

    In its wake, one recognizes the face of Death through the singular emotion of all-encompassing grief. It is devastating to bear. Slowly, in a mounting sensation, we realize we are, as the closest, living, relative attachment of the Newly Dead, engaged in a vicarious sharing of "the Journey" with them. As they cry out from beyond the grave for us, and we for them, the sheer weight of our ties (love and blood) creates a magnetic attraction, a rattling chain pulling us along, if you will, over physical and astral borders into the Land of No Return.

                                             Dodge, William de Leftwich, The Death of Minnehaha (1892)
     I affirmed this witnessing the catharsis of Ivan Ivanovitch, and later, through my own reckoning with the death of my darling Oma at the golden age of 95. She and I shared psychic bloodlines, spiritual healing paradigms, a love of old-world elegance, and crazed sounding laughter. She harkened from the Voivodeship of Silesia, Polish Slask, a northern realm between the Czech Republic's historical regions of Bohemia and Moravia. Margarethe (Greta) inherited her Grandmother's aptitudes (the village herbalist) and spent her professional career as a private nurse to the very wealthy. She initiated us in an aberrant form of cognition, a stark German biliousness, known as "the Humor of the Gallows." Her family had owned a café klatsch in Berlin, a fancy, multi-storied joint, with seventy billiard tables, replete with steins of Kolsch, cafe espresso, pastries, seven-layer cakes and petit-fours (she met my grand-father, a world-champion billiard player, there).

     Oma's standard greeting was, "Sit down before I knock you down", delivered with a swatting motion of her backhand (and, years later, her cane). Remarking on our indulgence as kids in eating only the "whites" of our sandwiches, she'd cooly pause before muttering a typically Yiddish curse, "Oneday, you'll go looking for those crusts of bread with bloody eyes." When her black cocker spaniel, Patsy was underfoot, she'd yell, "Get out of my way of I'll kill you!", the same went for anyone with the audacity to be driving anywhere near her. She dismissed the affairs of the world with her favorite mantra, "Quatsch!" (Yiddish for hogwash). Oma! Terrify me with the family curse! I promise I'll love you forever!
     Dearheart Greta, maiden name Zielke, is my theorized link of this side of my family's relationship to the Vampire Mythology of Eastern Europe. There is a legend based on Saxon people having appeared out of nowhere, living for centuries in a remote corner of the Carpathian mountains (her family's town, Krakow, lies at the northern tip). The following poem, entitled "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", by Robert Browning, belies this story:
                  "In Transylvania there's a tribe
                   of alien people who ascribe
                   the outlandish ways and dress 
                   on which their neighbors lay such stress
                   To their mothers and fathers having arisen
                   Out of some subterranean prison
                   Into which they had been trepanned              
                   Longtime ago, in a mighty band
                   Out of Hamelin town, in Brunswick land
                   But how, or why, they don't understand."

                                                                Christie, James Elder, Pied Piper of Hamelin (1881)
(given my affinity for flute playing, Oma's ancestors may have been those children following the Pied Piper, who led them into an 
earthy underground / dimensional portal!).
     Back to the Intercession of the Living - for six months following my Grandmother's passing, I instinctually felt I had joined her on "the Journey", spending solitary days in corpselike repose. The mystery of the matter lay hidden in the depths and struggles of our combined Psyches. Her blood runs in my veins, as the river Lethe flows through the Valley of Death (its course weighing heavily down on me!). In the duration it took for this strange spell to lift, I experienced a deep longing to die, partially to prove my love for her had no bounds. This ongoing "reckoning" with the Other Side provoked extreme conflict within my Soul. I knew instinctively she didn't expect me to die, only to render devotion to her memory, and transmigration, in sacred and compelling ways.

     She came to me many nights in dreams, often appearing as her younger Self, other times as frighteningly Undead, teaching me to communicate beyond physical reality. We each realized from our "Side" the existence of Life Beyond. In one dream meeting, I watched warily as she routinely washed dishes in the sink (a familiar sight after morning's apple pfannkuchen). Silently catching my eye, she then proceeded to take a little lie down on the kitchen floor, before slowly becoming invisible (which, frankly, I admire, as I, too, enjoy repose on a good hardwood floor). Most cultures have ornate, intricate and life-long rituals, honoring ancestors and the passing of the Dead. Our convenient, North American insta-culture begs off with embalmed ashes and a quick eulogy, or a satin-lined casket and a one-liner tombstone, adorned with plastic flowers. I'm grateful for her stardust-sprinkled visitations, so long ago, and occasionally, recurring.
     Ivan the Wonderful and the Death Family Circus lasted two moons, during which time each one of us....sanctimoniously (and unceremoniously) died.  Had we been Priests and Priestesses of a Holy Dynasty, in temples or pyramids of ancient Egypt or the Mayan civilization? We kept our secrets / archetypes close to heart: Ivan's Mother the Red Czarina; I, Persephone, vamping on the pomegranate seeds of my moonblood; M, my abductor, Lord Hades / Pluto of the Underworld; 'Tin and ZaZa - Osiris and Isis; and Ivan, our fearless benefactor, the Great Mayan King of the Galactic Hub; Pacal Votan of Palenque; conducting the vortex spaceship through the Giant Slab Doorway to our starry home. We were family entombed alive together, well within hearing range.

                                                       Teetering Bulb: Little Fictions, Persephone and Hades
     Our initiations created continuity between Time, Space and the interstellar speed of "Travelin' Light"1, affirming our destiny (and, hopefully, one day return trip) to the Stars. I am ecstatically linked  and gratefully linked to my brethren (and Soul Sister ZaZa) for co-creating the Set and Setting of these brave undertakings i.e. the Freudian applications of benzoylmethyl ecgonine2.

1 Cale, J.J., "Travelin' Light"
2 Chemical name for cocaine.

FULL DISCLOSURE:

      I have since realized the repercussions of the beast we call cocaine; the environmental degradation of the rainforest caused by the unsustainable mono-culture of the coca plant; its deleterious effects on indigenous cultures; the disrespect towards, and abuse of, a traditional sacred healing / medicinal plant; its equally harsh chemical synthesis and subsequent manipulations (crack cocaine); all of which foster serious individual and societal harm, and spiritual, mental and physical health deterioration; not to mention the ongoing violence implicit in the "War on Drugs", as controlled by drug enforcement agencies and international crime syndicates / cartels, which, in the name of power and profit, continues to claim hundreds of thousands of lives.