Many of us who attended the dance workshop felt like we had experienced something worth nourishing. The psychology professor who had invited the dance company to the January intersession “hosted” a Saturday afternoon improvisational session where we could continue coming together weekly to keep exploring.
For the final activity at one of our sessions, we sat in a large circle watching two people doing a contact improvisation dance within the circle. After a certain time, the professor would point to someone sitting in the circle. That person would enter the circle and flow into the dance, making it a dance of three. Then one of the other dancers would leave and a new dance of two would arise for several minutes. Then another dancer would enter, an earlier one would leave and the dance continued on, changing energy with each new combination. When my time came, I entered, one of the dancers soon left, and I and a female college student were dancing. In the course of our dancing, our energies came perfectly together. I remember little of our actual dancing because I was just flowing with the energy, being danced, but I do remember one moment.
I was rising up, she was sinking down and I felt that the path opening immediately ahead involved me tumbling head first over her onto the wooden floor. My mind detached from the dance with a cautioning awareness. I could not visualize how that move could actually work. It felt dangerous, beyond the edge of what I should attempt. But then my body was tumbling over, my consciousness went upside down, and, with the aid of her contact, came down upon the floor in a complexly smooth way I could never have foreseen. After that, the dance became the most beautiful dance I’ve ever experienced. The professor sent no one else into the circle to change it. We were being danced. Me. The Woman. Us. The Dance. Ringed by sitting dancers watching It. It drew to a close in a mutually sustained embrace. When we looked in each other’s eyes, our eyes confirmed what we had just shared.
The “class” was over. But the woman I had danced with (her name was Claudia) wanted to dance more. She asked the professor if we could all get together that evening and do more of this dancing. As we talked of a venue, Claudia remembered that there was going to be a dance at her dormitory and we all agreed to meet in her room that evening to go dancing.
The dance didn’t draw many people so our group dominated the dance floor with our unconventional freeform dancing. At one point, Claudia came up to me and we started dancing. It quieted to a hand dance. Palms against palms, our hands started gently moving like dolphins through the water or like soaring birds above the earth. Energy moved back and forth; now I leading, now she. Sweet. Not intense like that afternoon, but then this was only in the hands. Again, the energy drew to a close and a quiet embrace. Claudia looked at me and said, “I think you and I are going to have many beautiful dances together,” and then she danced off to dance with others.
Later, I was sitting to the side, watching the dancing, a great sense of calm upon me. I became aware that Claudia was lying on the floor. A few minutes later, paramedics came in with a stretcher, kneeling down beside Claudia. I continued sitting within a calmness. They took her out on a stretcher; the professor went with her, and we all went home. The next day I had to go to Seattle on business. When I returned, I learned that Claudia had died. The local paper ran the following article:
“Death–no need for explanation”
by Kay Ready, Walla Walla Union Bulletin, Friday, Februay 16, 1979
There was a death at Whitman College last weekend that defied medical explanation and human logic.
The coroner’s report showed that there was nothing physically wrong with Claudia Lee Meyer that caused her to stop breathing Saturday night and never regain consciousness.
Doctors shook their heads in vain as they tried for more than an hour to breathe life back into her 20 year old body.
Her closest friends were saddened, but they needed no further explanation.
“I am personally delighted by the autopsy,: said her friend and teacher Deborah DuNann, a Whitman College psychology professor.
“The fact that there was nothing in the autopsy helps us realize the spiritual significance of death. We cannot separate ourselves from her with a flimsy medical explanation. We need to realize that we are vulnerable, too, and that each day is precious. While we don’t understand why she left, it is clear to all who were there that she was ready.”
Ms. DuNann spoke those words as part of a memorial service for Claudia Tuesday in Whitman College’s Memorial Chapel. There–in the very room in which Claudia came many times to do her favorite thing in life: dance with friends – people crowded into every available chair and spilled out into the hallway to remember her in thoughts, song, prayer and tears.
Ms. DuNann and two of Claudia’s fellow dancers glided and twirled to the rhythm of Spanish Renaissance music. Several of Claudia’s friends read quotes and phrases that reminded them of the life she’d shared with them. One young woman sang a song– one for which “the words just kept coming as I sat down to write the morning after Claudia’s death,” she said.
As the service drew to a close, the sky began to color with the sunset. The rooms filled with Claudia’s favorite music — Beethoven’s 7th Symphony–and the chapel slowly emptied.
Outdoors, a rainbow stretched overhead and, in the amber-colored hours of late afternoon, the music could still be heard, soft and lilting.
“The service was as Claudia would have wanted it,” Ms. DuNann said. “It was full of the people she loved, of the lessons we need to face about our lives.”
She openly marveled at Claudia’s entire death experience.
“Her death…,” Ms. DuNann paused, “… was essentially perfect. I feel as if she could have unconsciously designed it to teach us about life and death. She was intensely interested in death as it had meaning for life.”
Claudia had been a student in Ms. DuNann’s death and dying seminar last year. “She thought a lot about the question of death. She understood what Kubler-Ross meant by calling it the advanced stage of growth. Claudia had an advanced stage of understanding it. And she was free to let go of life,” Ms. DuNann said.
Some people had commented to Ms. DuNann that they were upset that Claudia had died at such a young age with so much life ahead of her.
“It’s often difficult to see that life is defined by the present.” Ms. DuNann explained. “you don’t define a dancer’s dance by its ending. You let the dance reveal itself. That’s the way Claudia’s life was–a dance of the present.”
Events in the weeks leading up to Claudia’s death seemed to point to her acceptance of it.
“According to all of Claudia’s close friends, she was intensely happy the last week of her life. She was beaming.” Ms. DuNann said, with a smile of her own. “Her roommate told me she even had a hard time going to sleep because her days were so full.”
Last Saturday afternoon, hours before her death, Claudia had danced with members of her contact improvisation dance class.
“She danced exquisitely, beautifully. She had so much powerful energy going out from her. Claud later said that that dancing had been an exceptional experience for her,” Ms. DuNann said.
“We decided we wanted to go dancing that night,” Ms. DuNann said. “Since Claudia wasn’t old enough to get into any of the local dancing places, we decided to go to a dance in Lyman Hall, where Claudia lived. Some of her closest friends gathered in her room that night. She put on Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and we sat around and talked,” Ms. DuNann remembered. “Then we all went downstairs to help liven the party up,”
Ms. DuNann remembers, now, that she “felt, at the time, that Claudia was intensely happy. Claud was a very warm and affectionate person, but that night her hugs were especially strong. She kissed me on the forehead and danced away.”
“She was not on drugs or anything, like the rumors going around now. She was just happy. She was connecting with everyone in the room.”
Then, suddenly and unexplainably, she fell to the ground.
“When I first noticed her, it looked like she was resting. But when she didn’t get up in a minute, I went over to her and noticed she was unconscious and convulsing,” Ms. DuNann said “I had had a hard time finding her pulse, and I became concerned. We called for an ambulance and when it came a few minutes later she was still breathing.”
Her friends watched as the ambulance attendants gave Claudia oxygen, and Ms. DuNann climbed into the back of the waiting ambulance to be with Claudia on the ride to the hospital.
“As we were riding along, I suddenly realized that she could be dead,” Ms. DuNann said. “I thought about praying for her to stay live. But all I could do was wait. If she needed to leave, she didn’t need my begging her to stay.”
Emergency room doctors confirmed her suspicions less than an hour later.
“The doctor walked out of the room in which they were working so hard to bring her back to life. And he just looked at me with baffled honesty.” Ms. DuNann explained. “He said she should be alive. He said she was in perfect health, that she shouldn’t have been in cardiac arrest, she should have responded to treatment. He just couldn’t explain.”
Autopsy finding are still inconclusive.
“The publicness of her death was so very important to us,” Ms. DuNann said.
“With her death, she helped us learn that death is not a horrible, gruesome experience. She was doing something that she loved when she took her last breaths. She was happy and she didn’t fight it.”
“One really interesting thing about her death–one more thing that makes me think hers was a perfect death–is that Claud left no unfinished business with anyone,” Ms. DuNann explained.
“Nobody that I’ve talked to can really think of anything they wanted to say to her, but never got a chance to. She connected with everyone, even her family, before she died.
“She’d gone home the weekend before to surprise her father for his birthday. Her whole family was there and they all had a good, happy time together.”
Ms. DuNann said that Claudia’s father had remarked about the coincidence of the visit when he arrived at Whitman the Sunday morning after his daughter’s death.
“He told me he couldn’t have accepted her death as well had he not seen her the weekend before,” Ms. DuNann explained.
“That’s the way it was with all of us,” she continued.
“Several people have observed that her closest friends are the ones least upset by her death. That’s because of a strength we received from Claudia herself. We know her death is not a loss, not a rip-off, not a tragedy.
“It’s O.K. Claudia told us that herself with her life.”
I don’t know what conclusion can be accurately drawn from this experience except that I have a responsibility to tell it as accurately as I can.
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