My mother was a neurotic anal-retentive all about the Purell and the egg-free batter licking, so when I dropped dead while teaching a yoga class at age twenty-five, she would have none of it. It was her yoga studio, and a grieving mother with a buried daughter did not suit. She laid my body out on the instructor’s dais and combed my long hair and filed my square nails, both of which kept growing, though I did not open my eyes.
She believed herself to be a good person, but my mother was relieved I was gone. (She’d never gotten over having to care for someone else just when she’d finally come into her own.) So my mother navigated the cognitive dissonance thus: she convinced herself it was better for me that I was dead—no more psychoanalysis, no more blind dates with charming narcissists who had projective identification issues, no more apple cider vinegar cleanses. Ironically, she was right. But not for the reasons she told herself. What my mother didn’t know about death: there was a clarity to being dead. The thick glass between the world and me melted away. Je pense donc je ne suis plus. I think because I’m no longer. No longer prone to the distractions of the body, my mind at last was free. Death offered an integrity that life could not. In essence, I was more myself now that I was dead.
In life I’d been obsessed with my body. Either its improvement—Burpees, brow gel—or its discomforts—PMS, paper cuts. Dead, I had use for neither hypochondria nor the latest self-help webinars. It was a relief no longer worrying about halter bras or halitosis. Even when it’s short, life is long.
I dropped dead, and the transformation was like eating a poem. Jackal’s benediction in the forest of the heart. Language made fresh tunnels in me like worms in compost. I was a stilled hammock, cupped with shadow and atmosphere. A flower plucked, drying in the sun.
It helped that I was freed of embodied memories. My hands forgot gripping. My closed mouth was just another curtained entrance. Even my face could not remember how to grin in discomfort or tense at a compliment. So it was true: arrange your face in a relaxed position and inner stillness followed. I was all presence. At last, I could be the introvert that I was. And there was nothing but time. Time for the slow spread of day across the studio’s gray walls; time for the flow of traffic outside the window as it swished the rain-slicked street.
Allow me to explain: the shock of being dead is that your sense gates open. Everything opaque becomes apparent, and the world offers itself to your third eye. Thanks to the Ajna chakra, I perceived everything around me; the world rushed in and death was a coming home. I had vision without any of the ugly senses—sight but no taste, hearing but no feeling. And the best part of being dead? No more smells. Everything smelled when I was alive—the world was an assault of odor—breath, sewage, sweat, dog, mulch, exhaust. . . . Now the studio could fill with overheating bodies, the Chinese takeout in the storefront below could fry onions, the oil truck could pump its vaporous delivery into the building, and I was at peace. Ah-ooh-mm. Nothingness. It was a beautiful thing.
Twice daily my mother brushed my skin with sisal bristles, so I remained radiant and supple. When it became apparent that my menses would continue regardless of my expired state, she brought the stash of sanitary pads from the bathroom to the yoga dais and changed them between classes. She didn’t have to plan. Once I was dead, my periods followed the moon strictly.
At first the students were spooked. They walked into class, spied me lying there on my mat, unmoving in my harem pants and swing tank, and giggled nervously. My mother taught her classes—sometimes standing in front of me, sometimes walking around the room—and because she was their teacher and because she scared them more than my prone presence did, they soon acclimated to the setup.
My mother was a presence, not only in the yoga studio, but in the town. She owned the studio, the building which housed the studio, and the sister building by the river where her world-famous yogaware company was based and in which she employed three quarters of the town. She knew the entire police force by name. In all but appointment, she ran the PTA. There were students in her classes who hated yoga but were afraid of what my mother would say or do if they didn’t show up. She kept the synovial fluid of the town’s population flowing whether they liked it or not.
“Bring your inner gaze to your midbrain,” my mother told her classes, glancing from me to them. She found inspiration in my prone state. “Enter the yoga of suspended awareness. Can you imagine controlling your life force?” On her own, between classes, she sat steadily beside me working on her Pratyahara, withdrawing from the senses. My mother was competitive, and my youth and beauty had been hard on her. In middle age she had thickened and creased, and any attention I received, she received as inattention to herself. So as I lay immobile on the stage of her yoga studio, she took up the challenge to meet and surpass my internal state with the perfection of her own Samadhi.
Still, in the beginning surrender was an adjustment. There were days I would have liked to have gotten up, taken a walk by the river. Particularly at sunset, when the room filled with a reddish glow and a hush came over the studio, and I knew something beautiful was dying outside that I could no longer participate in. I would have liked a fire in the fireplace; I would have liked to read.
Anyway, one could adapt to just about anything. If neuroscientists could swap people into different bodies through experiments with mannequins and helmet cameras—a woman into a man’s, a slim man into an obese man, a man with three arms, a woman with a foot-long nose—and they all adjusted, so could I. And so I did. In fact, if you’d asked me after the first few weeks, I’d have said, best day of my life was my death. I used to be self-conscious—do my bangs make me look stupid? If I look you in the eye, will you think I want to fuck you? No more. I never much liked myself. In fact, when I was alive I saw myself as a perpetual Under Development Work-in-Progress. I wasn’t nice enough; I wasn’t authentic enough. I looked out only for myself; I put everybody else first. I wasn’t generous; I was a pushover. I had no style; I was always looking for attention. It was confusing. It was exhausting. Then I died and, after a short acclimation, it was like hitting the happiness jackpot.
Five Proven Happiness Hacks:
- Friends and Family. According to a study in Journal of Socio-Economics, regularly seeing friends and family was worth $97,265 a year. I was with my mother forty hours a week, and the studio filled daily with regulars. What’s more, another study showed the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. By just lying there, I was a constant reminder of the preciousness of life. Yogis could repeat all there is is the present moment all day long, but nothing was as puissant as a baby-faced dead girl to bring the message home. Plus, my former students still posted on my Facebook page, reread my blog (EyeBow2U) and rewatched my Vlogs (Yoga vs. Life). I was the gift that kept on giving.
- Fifty-seven degrees. According to research published by the American Meteorological Society, happiness is maximized at fifty-seven degrees. Located as it was in an old warehouse building, the studio had huge, leaky windows, and I was lucky enough to be laid out under the leakiest of them all. In winter, even when the heat was clicking and cranking, my body benefited from a steady, bracing breeze. Also, to preserve me and her bottom line, my mother turned the heat down between classes, and summertime the studio stayed cool from a combination of shade and the pittas in the classes constantly asking to turn up the AC and fans.
- Light. Sunlight brightens mood. My apartment was dark and had shades. The studio was a prism for moving light—silver to yolk to fever to steel.
- Citrus. For dozens of years, International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. measured the effects of aromas on emotions through mood mapping. Citrus scents were shown to lift mood. When I was alive, I was allergic to perfume and had to air out the studio after Marjorie’s class because she wore orange jasmine essential oil on her pressure points. When I died, she took over my classes and now, there was citrus positivity five times a week where I lay. To cell physiologists aware of the numerous olfactory receptors in skin, the perks of aromatherapy for a picky anosmiac should not surprise.
- Touch. A study from UNC Chapel Hill found human touch essential to happiness, and just as one may benefit from odor without the ability to smell, one may benefit from touch without being able to feel. My mother read an article about the far-reaching effects of touch and booked me a weekly Thai massage. George was a small, brown-skinned, ageless man with close-cropped hair and muscular hands. When he arrived for the first appointment, my mother launched into an explanation of the situation. George cut her off with a quiet pressure on her shoulder.
“I have hospice training,” he said. He opened his rubber massage mat and lifted me face down onto it. He then proceeded to pull, stretch, and rock me. It was novel not to worry about sexual feelings or bodily embarrassments—there was a small release of flatulence, which George gamely ignored. When it came time to turn me face up, he lifted me from the waist and spun me around. I remained clothed, so there was none of the usual awkwardness of under-the-sheet flashing. George’s professionalism was impeccable, which was a first for me, and a little insulting. No flirtatious banter, no sly brush of hand over breast. He massaged me supine, prone, side-lying, and seated. He pulled my fingers, cracked my toes, walked on my back . . . all the while accompanying his rhythm with a steady, chatty monologue.
Over the weeks I came to know things about George even his priest didn’t know: he called his legislators every morning and wrote a letter to the president every day expressing measured outrage in memes he scoured from the Internet and printed on recycled paper. He counted his steps to be sure he went to bed on an even number. Older women’s ankles made him miss his aunt. He recited the same joke aloud in his car before every job. He kept his dried, used contact lenses in a baby-food jar on the windowsill. He acted out the scenes of mystery novels as he read them.
Things continued in the pure, timeless way of death for me while all around, life went on, and soon it was approaching the shortest day of the year. On that day it so happened a man came to the studio to sample a trial class. When he walked into the room, he was so taken by the vision of my beautiful, lifeless body, he had to take off his Tom Ford green frame eyeglasses so as not to stare. After class, he waited outside the studio for me to exit. When I didn’t, he waited until the last class of the day had come and gone, and after my mother turned off the lights and locked the door, he broke into the studio through an unlocked bathroom window.
“Hello?” he called into the darkness. “Are you there?” When no one answered, he opened the door to the studio and stood staring at me from across the room. First, he cleared his throat. He turned the lights on and quickly off. Then, he approached me, placed his hands on my shoulders and gave me a shake. When I did not respond, he slapped my face. Finally, he leaned his head down over my lips and breathed into my mouth. With each of his breaths my lungs filled with air and my chest rose. This seemed to be enough for him. Or I should say, too much. He pulled my shirt over my head and cupped my breasts in his hands. Soon he was astride me. He pushed my waistband to my knees and forced himself inside me. He growled softly as he moved and toward the end, called out, “I love you!”
Had I been alive, I might have eaten copious amounts of processed food, gained two hundred pounds, and shaved off all my hair. I might have written a book of harrowingly deft poems channeling a pre-Raphaelite Parisian prostitute, or become an installation artist known for panoramic friezes made of lace from the underwear of human trafficking victims. As it was, I was dead and had neither the ability nor the need to do a thing.
The next day my mother found me as I’d been left: hair in my mouth, shirt over my nose, ripped thong. . . . She cleaned and redressed me, mumbled Om Shanti Shanti Shanti under her breath, and carried on. There followed a period of low class attendance, which may have been a reflection of my mother’s state of mind (Tamas), or it may have been just the cold days and long nights. In the past, this lull in business would have meant endless arguments with my mother. She was a stress arguer. I was a stress ruminator. And while being dead was stress-free, I could still pick up the tension she emitted. Scientific aside to prove my point—
Cleve Backster, world expert on the use of polygraphs, experimented with plants, bacteria, eggs, sperm, and white cells from the mouth to prove they all showed signs of connected intelligence: When the sperm donor inhaled amyl nitrate, his sperm in the next room went wild; when a Pearl Harbor vet went home to watch a TV show on Japanese air strikes, his white cheek cells miles away reacted to the threat.
So, yes, I picked up on my mother’s slow-season stress. And yes, because I’d been a habitual stress ruminator, ideas arrived like cud those quiet days.
For example, one of my former students lost thirty-five pounds, and when her friend complimented her new body, as they returned their bolsters to the pile near my feet, she confided her fear that she wouldn’t be able to keep off the weight. The idea—weight loss vs. maintenance—led to a good week of chewing: why were diets so good at getting weight off and so bad at keeping it off? Wasn’t it the same skill: do eat this; don’t eat that? Why did the average woman spend thirty-one years of her life on a diet? What if it weren’t the thin body slimmers craved, but the goal of the thin body? What if you could harness that goal seeking? Raise people up the evolutionary ladder all the way from wanting a thin body to wanting a better world? Like Maimonides’ Eight Degrees of Tzedakah (one year at Shari Tefilah Hebrew School before my mother became Buddhist). Could this change the world? To this dead girl it sure seemed it could. It was odd having all the time in the world to pick up on what was going on and yet, to have no ability to do anything about it.
Astounding is the power of a brain, even a dead brain. One day my mother gave a dharma talk on the practice of surrender in which she led everyone in a guided meditation. “Bring your attention to your heart center. What is the quality of your heart? Is there constriction? Imagine you can see from your heart. Imagine your heart is a flower bud. Inhale into the bud of your heart. Exhale and allow the bud to begin to open. One out-breath at a time. See the bud of your heart open slowly, gently, into a beautiful flower, petal by petal, breath by breath. . . .”
Everyone was doing it. The room filled with carbon dioxide with each exhalation. In a matter of minutes there was a crowded sense of flowers, a funerary overflow of conjured bouquets, and people began rocking queasily on their cushions. Someone coughed. Someone else gagged. One woman rose from her mat hunched and slipped quickly out of the room. Another followed, even more quickly, hand over mouth. My mother rose and opened the window. This caused more agitation in the group. A man opened the door that led to the balcony. Soon flies were buzzing around my head.
In the end it was a thanatology student who happened to be in the class that day who identified the problem. She leaned toward my mother and whispered, “Carrion flower,” with a nod in my direction. Apparently my mother’s guided meditation had conjured a species of Amorphophallus titanum in me that, predictably, emitted the odor of rotting flesh. Quickly my mother switched the visualization to a breezy white sand beach, and the class resumed.
Snow plows scraped and salted streets, then the white-breasted nuthatch began its nasal call, and then I was showing. At first my mother tried to hide it, rearranged my top to distract from the small belly bump. It was useless to resist, however, and she quickly switched to Seva as her tactic and began instead to pay me extra attention—rubbing my lips with expensive balms, acupressure on my hands and feet, reading stories to me between classes.
Second week of spring, the thanatology student returned to class, and after wiping sweat from her brow, she asked my mother’s permission to use me as a case study for her final course requirement: Independent Applied Research Project—Death, a Near-Life Experience.
“With my precertification, if I stand watch over her body, there will be no need to worry about the authorities,” she said. To my mother, the threat was both vague and laughable. Nevertheless, she agreed. My mother craved a break. When she was pregnant with me, she told me (chin bowed, hands over her sacral chakra) she wasn’t ready to be a mother; when I turned twenty, she asked me how I could be so old when she was so young. When I was alive, I interfered with my mother’s life. Dead, I did as well. So my mother left the vigil to the thanatology student, telling herself she was doing the intense young woman a favor.
The woman, Sylvie, was indeed intense. But not so young. She was, in fact, forty-nine, and treating herself with gene therapy to reverse her aging. Every morning since 1988 she injected into her thigh the spun cells of the Turritopsis nutricula, a small species of jellyfish known to be biologically immortal. Sylvie had long, silken hair. Her skin was luminous to the point of near transparency. She moved on the yoga mat with the fluidity of water. When my mother left for the day, Sylvie took up her post. She sat in meditation, using my whirlpool-shaped outie navel as her Drishti. Om Namah Shivaya, she chanted, and a swirl of energy swept the room like sea grass.
By the sixth day of Sylvie’s attentions, something crucial had shifted. Another student, for years a regular at the studio, arrived to class with a basket slung over her elbow. After unrolling her mat, she laid her offerings at my feet—heirloom seeds in a dozen cups that had the quality of filling the air with a sense of childlike awe. My mother reacted immediately. She told Sylvie enough was enough. “Go home. Take a break. Feed your fish.” My mother’s agitation did not faze Sylvie, who only smiled back. A subtle, muscle-less smile that caused my mother to turn away and float out of the room.
By the end of that week, my body was cocooned in a pile of alms from the community at large: pizza delivery boy (six-pack of beer), parking enforcement officer (jars of ointment), energy bar rep (carton of oatmeal), CSA organizer (loaves of chocolate chip pumpkin bread), receptionist (deck of Queen of Hearts cards), mother of receptionist (drawer sachets), and nearly every student (marbles, eyeliner, pocket knives . . .) paid his or her respects.
It was during Sylvie’s vigil that she and George first met. Initially, he was against her being in the room during the massage. “This is an act of solo service,” he said. “Only caregiver and care-receiver,” but he was not impervious to the joy induced by her citrus stem-cell serum, and when Sylvie replied with her watery smile, he simply began. She fell for the way his hands fixed my body while his feet massaged it. He fell for her fierce gelatinousness. Soon George was chauffeuring Sylvie back and forth from the studio to her, or more often his, place.
Forty weeks to the day of the break-in, my water broke. It was at the end of one of my mother’s advanced Vinyasa Flow classes—“Can you make your pushups exercises in weightlessness.” And because it was a slow, high leak, she dabbed with her sock at the puddle spreading slowly over the dais, draped a blanket over my lap and continued through the purifying sweat, the even, deep breathing and the guided meditation to Savasana, Corpse Pose, Namaste.
I remained deathly throughout the labor, which was fine with my mother. She managed the whole bloody affair with the assistance of Sylvie’s unsettling adaptability and her own competence and expertise. At the start of my third trimester, my mother had bought a stethoscope on eBay, and when my contractions began, she tracked them, methodically recording my labor’s phases. She placed me in Yatangasana, Extended Child Pose, and Sylvie kneaded my lower back. When I was in transition, they carried me into a rented tub for the water birth my mother had planned to minimize the baby’s traumatic change of environment, and when labor briefly stalled, Sylvie palpitated my belly as my mother repeatedly pulled on my arms and lifted my dead weight from a prone position to one in which I sat up with every delayed contraction until my body’s sit-ups pushed the baby out. With her usual efficiency, my mother suctioned the little boy’s nostrils clear, and he cried. Just as they’d taken my body from the tub and begun to dry me, my uterus convulsed again, and Sylvie caught a baby girl. Twins. Each woman lifted a newborn to one of my breasts where the babies nursed vigorously. “Compassionate presence,” Sylvie wrote in her masters thesis, “leads to surprising end-of-life beginnings.”
At first my mother acted as if nothing had changed. The twins slept in clear, hospital-grade bassinets at my side. Classes were taught. Diapers were changed. Soon, however, the infants became distracting. They were ideal babies—content to stare at their open futures with undisturbed eyes—but their very placidity quickly became their liability. No one could resist them. Classes were overbooked with students sidetracked from their asanas by an overpowering urge to be near the burbling babies. Everyone wanted to hold the infants, to smell their scalps, to swaddle and rock them. At the beginning of class when the instructors invited the class to set their intentions, students offered to bathe the twins, to knit them hats, to sing to them. Finally, claiming it was for the protection of her grandchildren’s undeveloped immune systems, my mother relocated the babies to the back studio reserved for private sessions where Sylvie and the receptionist alternated babysitting. Soon the infants were used to feeding only between classes and the day’s schedule was allowed to proceed.
Sylvie continued her inquisition over my body for the final weeks of her research project. After the birth, she took to lugging her harp into the studio and singing songs based on observations of my physiology and the interpersonal dynamics she witnessed around me. Her music brought more life to my death. My mother could not organize fast enough to keep the gifts brought by my (and now my children’s) devotees from accumulating beyond the windowsill meditation altars. Almost immediately after the births, students began dropping off packs of blankets, bags of onesies, books, booties, blocks. . . . By the time the babies were a month old, a half-dozen twin strollers were blocking the entrance to the door.
And there was another problem. My mother noticed George’s interest in Sylvie and was hurt. She had told herself the small man was surely homosexual as a way to defend against his lack of interest in her. When it became clear that George was not unaffected by female charm, my mother took it personally that he had not given her a second look. That a dead girl and a pale thanatologist were getting more love than she was, was temporarily too much for her. Claiming it was in protest of the elections, she shut the studio and donated all the detritus of devotion to the local food pantry and children’s charity. She gave Sylvie the key and told her if she wanted to continue to use me for her research, she would need to take responsibility for the babies for a while as well. No doubt eager for the chance to test George’s paternal instincts, Sylvie agreed.
“Take care,” my mother said to her dead daughter, as she shut the door behind herself and set off for two weeks of chocolate-making workshops with raw, local cacao at a yoga-teachers’ retreat in Costa Rica. My mother left, safe in the assumption that the babies would be cared for, and I would go nowhere.
I was not, however, left alone. After Sylvie and George left, taking the babies and a supply of milk my mother had pumped from me and stored in the small freezer in the office, the man who had broken in to the studio returned. Every night thereafter he brought a different quote from Rumi. Each night the result was the same: “Love is a river, drink from it,” and his lips were on mine. “When love itself comes to kiss you, don’t hold back,” and my legs were spread. “How can there be weariness when passion is present?” and he was pumping away.
Each night he began more diffident and ended more desperate. On the fourteenth night, convinced he’d heard me speak, he pressed his ear to my throat, pried my mouth open, and quickly fell asleep slumped over my bare chest. When my mother arrived at 6:00 a.m. to open the studio and resume her business, she found him there and thought he, too, was dead. The police arrived and asked if she wanted to press charges. It was not clear if they meant breaking and entering or necrophilia. By then the man was again muttering Rumi: “Where are you now, my beloved? Do you hear my weeping from beyond the ocean? Do you understand my need? Do you know the greatness of my patience?”
Instead of charges, my mother saw an opportunity. She summoned a justice of the peace to marry us. In that same Journal of Socio-Economics study that valued the happiness of connection with friends, a happy marriage was worth $105,000 a year. My value had increased, and my mother could finally pass responsibility for me from next-of-kin to spouse. Announcing it was for our privacy, she locked me with the newly returned and fattened babies in the back studio, transferring the key from Sylvie to my husband. No longer needing to break in, he made a marriage bed of mats and blankets and bolsters and blocks and for a week or so, came and went in typical husbandly fashion, making love to my body, occasionally tickling the children.
Meanwhile, for her work in the field, Sylvie received the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Award. With the help of the monetary award, Sylvie and George found themselves in a position to act upon a dream heretofore unspoken: to move to Alaska. At a sober meeting with my mother and her son-in-law over herbal tea and vegan shortbread, the luck-struck pair offered to adopt the twins and raise them “in a well-developed homeschool system and the best star-gazing environment on the planet.” My mother and husband were only too happy to oblige.
Happy endings, however, are complicated to pull off. The two-week closing of the studio had had an unexpected result: no one came back. The closure broke the spell of devotion, first to my mother, then to me.
After the honeymoon phase wore off, my husband did not return. It was my mother and me, alone again. It was quiet and strange. My mother continued her practice and left the doors open, secure in the belief that people would come again—new people who moved up from the city and didn’t know her or me or the story of my life after death. In preparation, she rigged a funnel and drain for my periods and finally left me alone in the small studio behind the locked door. At last I seemed to her the perfect daughter—self-sufficient and safe.
I heard her playing her singing bowl, but the sound was small and far off now. The heat hissed, and I could sense something beginning to rot.