THE EDGE

While You're Going to Die began as a place to encourage community to express themselves [because after all, we’re all going to die, so what do we have to lose other than this one chance we have to share ourselves others?], after my mother-in-law’s death, our trajectory shifted to making explicit room for grief & facing our mortality, sourcing our experienced & eventual losses to deepen & inspire our being ALIVE.

And now, after over 5 years acting as a creatively conscious mortality nonprofit, there is an evolved purpose that I believe umbrellas all of what we do…

What connects all of our work now more than ever – the podcast, our programming, concerts, workshops, open mics, really anything we do – seems to be the act of showing up at the edge, connecting community where what really matters becomes undeniably crystal clear.

Whether it’s the edge grief brings us to,
the edge of mortality – our own dying & the dying of those we love,
the edge our hospice patient community offers us,
the edge the prison system forces so many towards…

It’s at these edges where truth crystalizes.

Where what we really care about, what we should care about, what we haven’t cared about enough, what we forgot to care about, becomes obvious. Shedding the shallow, the pretentious, the fake, the trivial, the trite. And magnifying the momentous, the precious, the most meaningful.

And almost more than anything we do, it’s my work with our cancer patient community that consistently brings me there.

Having lost my mother, & so many of the mothers in my life, to cancer, there may not be an edge that matters more to me personally.

I often say how much I wish my mom had the opportunity during her treatment for creative catharsis, processing, & the space to be with other cancer patient community. But now, every week, all week long, when I walk in the cancer patient hospital rooms & facilitate their creativity & writing workshops, my mom is right there with me.

Of course, we all die eventually, but one of the cancer patients I work with sent me this picture of their Diagnosis Anniversary cake… & it’s my favorite visual representation of the edge our cancer patient community lives at.

It’s a cake I wish my mom could still eat. But it’s also a cake she deserved for 13 years of my life. For surviving cancer while still needing to do ALL the other things life demanded of her day after day, including doing a damn good job of effectively raising two kids as a single mom.

So, I wanted to share this cake with all of you, a gift from a new friend, on behalf of my mom, all my moms, on behalf of the cancer patient community they represent, as a reminder, because this cake is for all of us…

Make room for the edge. Remember to NEVER take anything for granted. Tomorrow is not a promise. We are vulnerable, fragile, fleeting mortal beings, actually ALWAYS at the edge of our mortality, just mostly living – sometimes by necessity, sometimes by privilege – like we’re not.

So, good job not dying… yet!

[cake & photo cred @ Tara Mohtadi]