The Bone Collector

Thoughts on leaving the past behind + burying the dead

I dreamed I was wearing my funeral dress again.

At least, I think it was a dream. These days, the veil between my worlds is so thin that the boundaries between dreams and reality blur in the most beautiful of ways.

It was autumn, a cold snap on the horizon, and I drew my shawl tighter around me to stave off the chill in the air. The ground before my bare feet is littered with boxes — some large, some weathered + worn, all colors and shapes and sizes.

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I know why I’m here; it’s time. I’m the bone collector, you see. Each of the boxes before me contain fragments of all the women I used to be. They hold the remains of the lives I’ve lived, the people I once was. But today it’s time to bury them. Today it’s time to scratch the surface of the damp earth with my bare hands, time to dig all these little graves. Today it’s time to lay the bones in the ground.

My eyes sweep over my collection, lingering on one of the larger boxes, speckled with rainbow splatters. I know what I have in there, how close to my chest I’ve kept this one. I imagine opening the lid and drinking in all the memories: a sleepover with my grandparents during the impossibly hot days of summer, our sweaty + sticky bodies sighing with relief as we set up sleeping bags in the cool of the basement. Green grass at the foot of the clothesline. My gray bunny with the blue eyes and floppy ears. A curled lock of hair that whispers to me in the voices of my grandmothers. Shards of broken beer bottles, and crushed up pills on the coffee table. The flashing red and blue of police lights. Perfect scores on spelling tests, and bowls of Shredded Wheat for dinner, and pails of snow melting on the woodstove for water. Pine trees + maple leaves, waterfalls + the clear, cool lakes I once swam in during long July afternoons.

Beside that box lays another — brown, beat up and bruised. It still smells of the perfume I wore on the day I married my first husband. For years, I didn’t know how to close this one. I’d start to, but the bones would start to get restless, singing me songs of church bells and interstate diners, summer nights around a campfire. Gravel driveways. Puppy love. The sting of betrayal — the whispers, the secrets, the hot tears on my cheeks. Slamming doors and panic attacks. Sleeping pills and sad brown eyes. A piece of paper in my mailbox: “Let it be decreed,” the judge had written.

For seven years, I was that wife. For seven years, I was that woman.
I was all these people, once.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to bury my dead, all the versions of myself that I will never be again.
But now, all that remains are the bones.

There are other boxes, too. Ones that smell of salty ocean air. Brush fires and plantains sizzling in palm oil, the rumble of a generator in the middle of the night. Boxes of bones from the years I spent on airplanes, living out of suitcases and Rubbermaid bins. Bones that bear the scars of depression, and trauma, and attempts to take my own life. There are boxes colored by the dust of Harmattan and the outline of footsteps crunched into the year’s first snowfall.

The yellow box is my favorite; it’s from my summer season. It seems like only yesterday I put this one away. The bones inside carry memories of vows made on a chilly October afternoon. Wine and bread. The call of a loon. My womb swollen. The large bay window in our first home.

Underneath: more bones. I have one child who still clings to my skirt folds, another who has severed herself from our family just as suddenly as she joined it. My time with her was so short, the hope so fleeting, and now I’m left laying the bones in the ground.

The possibilities of another fades with every new month’s bleed. These bones hold a grief I cannot name, one my tongue does not know words for. They groan with the weight of all these versions of myself I will never be again. There are bones of the hands I held as they breathed their last, the dead babies I baptized in the middle of the night. Blood-stained sheets and dark hospital hallways, candlelight and whispered prayers over the beeps of a ventilator.

I was all these women at one time or another. Like a cloak, I draped myself in the parts I played, all the roles I’ve filled.

Now I wear only the bones.

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But do not mourn for me, for it is good, and right, and true that a woman should do this work of sifting through her bones, through her memories, through who she had been once upon a time.

I’ve said I’m in my autumn season these days. All of life moves in cycles, you see. From the shifting phases of the moon to the ebb + flow of the tides, to our circadian cycles + each season of the year — everything is intertwined, connected to and with one another by a natural rhythm. These patterns are far from random; they are reflections of a larger, universal order that has nurtured life on Earth for millenia. I’ve lived what seems like a thousand different lives in my four+ decades, sucked the marrow of a rich, full life from my spring and summer seasons; the joy, the love, the grief, the pain, the adventure, the thrill, the lessons, the beauty — I relished it all.

And now I’ve entered my slow, savory autumn. I’m not calling it a mid-life crisis; it’s a reorienting. It’s a shaking-off-the-dust season, a self-compassion season, a protecting-my-peace season, a speak-the-truth-even-if-my-voice-shakes season. It’s a I’m-in-my-healing-era season, a boundaries-are-my-friend season, a wild-wise-and-untamable-woman season. Just as trees draw their energies inward during autumn, I’m following their lead and returning to myself. It’s a deep-exhale, settling-in-my-bones, sinking-into-my-belovedness season. I’m resting and laughing and praying and preaching and prophesying, writing and thinking and exploring and creating. I’m coming back to the Table, where the voice of God has always been calling to me, where a place has always been set for me, where the Spirit is welcoming me home.