In the Permanent Collection

Dance of Death

46 DANCE OF DEATH What would they want? Surely not this sappy ballad, this slide-show parade of flowers on display. It was a Friday afternoon in April, at the memorial for students who had died, and one of mine, suicide in early spring, was on the screen. Then came the headshot of a student I forgot between crocus-in-snow and peony/rainbow. Both men young, but one was withdrawn, the other a know-it-all. As a voice tolled out the proper nouns, elsewhere in town the kids were already ramping up their party with weekend death, contemporary sketches of Hans Holbein: a skeleton holding the beer bong, a skeleton popping the tire of his parents’ old car on a curb, a skeleton puking his missing guts into the tulip bed. I’ve always said I wasn’t afraid of death, but still they want you to get the transplant or the breathing device or whatever else will keep you alive and whoever loves you happy. The dance goes on, the best and worst of us, all will be replaced, and if you believe everything they say, this very minute a sucker is born. Poor purple-faced rube, little rooster. Give him the suction hose, attach some censors to his big head. Let him beg, bribe, whatever. He’ll end up like them, 47 unshaven and unhappy, or else like us, tearless at a perfunctory ceremony that ends with alma mater, song of the bountiful mother, which trips through the same yearning notes no matter where it plays. ...