The Grave: This graveyard is in the countryside, close to the village where my mother grew up. The small red heart is where my mother’s urn rests. The cross is for her father. The grave on the left is her brother’s resting place, and the one on the right is her grandmother’s. Where the heart is, we will place a rock in the shape of a 12-string guitar.

Like so many true artists, despite all her faults, she was greater than life. During her last years on this planet, she lost the connection with her creative muse. She withdrew further into her disease and self-destructive patterns. She told no one how ill she was as she dealt with lung cancer on her own in another country: no drugs, no operations, no hospitals. She was doing this death battle as was done in the old days: She knew her time on this planet was coming to an end, and she didn’t fight it. She didn’t want to change anything.

No one knew she was coughing up blood until she finally fell down bleeding on the floor in her local grocery shop, died, and was revived. Her fall was great, but greater still was her ability to make no fuss over life and death. She stayed for one day at the hospital, and she spent that day calming family and friends, telling us not to worry. She believed she would be home the following day. I could hear that her voice was frail. I managed to convince her that it was a good idea that my brother and I fly to Denmark to visit with her at the hospital. She sounded ill, yet she had not lost her pitch-black humor. The day before, she lost one-third of her blood on the floor in the shop. She never did anything halfway.

Early next morning, as my brother and I were boarding the plane for Denmark to stay with her at her deathbed, we got a call; our mother had passed away in her sleep during the night. It was the most difficult journey I have ever taken. To hold the grief within — a tsunami of emotion — because it is not socially acceptable to lose it in public spaces like planes, my brother and I made sure not to look at each other. We just breathed shallowly to keep it all in. And, in perfect harmony with the dramatic flair of my everyday life, the low-budget plane was full of dentists, including my own dentist, who was getting drunker as each moment passed. The only thing missing was for them to start singing one of my mother’s songs.

When the long journey was finally over, we arrived at the hospital where my mother had taken her last breath. In a surreal way, we had to run around this big and impersonal hospital to find her body and the rest of her belongings. Since it is totally socially acceptable to sort of lose it around death, I did when I finally got to see her shell. And as I was kissing her lifeless face, stroking her hair full of blood, and sensing that she was really gone, I was granted the true realization of the fact that indeed my father was also dead, despite wishful thinking for 20 years.

My father walked into an ice-cold river on Christmas Eve some 20 years ago. He didn’t know how to swim, and thus his mission was suicide. His body was never recovered, so his death was always a bit unreal. Later, my husband played the same suicidal game. His bones, however, were found five years later in the beautiful and breathtaking landscape of the glacier where the entrance to the center of the Earth is supposed to be, at least according to Jules Verne. Thus, that death was also unreal. Yet in this process, I realized the value of the ritual of death. I realized the importance of tears rolling down into the fabric of death: touching, smelling, feeling, and making new memories beyond death.