Killing Death Dead
A letter to Amy about punching death in the face
This is a letter to Amy, my oldest and dearest friend. We met as babies. I grabbed onto one of her curls and haven’t ever let go.
Dear Amy,
Every time we write or talk, we have so many other things to tell each other that I’ve been writing you this newsletter for a month, trying to get this thing out that’s been tracking me but keeps getting pushed aside. But what happened with Sara yesterday brought it all back to the front of my mind.
Your last message really stayed with me. You said you’d actually been doing better lately—that your head had been a little above water—but when you went on vacation, expecting to finally reconnect with joy, instead, found grief crashed back in. That the break actually made room for the sorrow to rise back up. Damn, this grief is long—immense and shape-shifting.
I’m still figuring out how to be there for you. All the different ways I’ve tried: the story Halving, the rituals we tried, the time we spent last summer trying to give you the funeral your brother never got to have. The things that helped a little, and the things that didn’t.
So—a few weeks ago, I was leading one of the workshops I’ve been doing solo since January with the Anim’Bulles group, and V1, a longtime participant, suddenly curled up into a ball, sobbing—alternating between going entirely rigid and curling into himself. It was pretty alarming.
This sort of thing happened in the beginning, all those years ago, but this seemed different, more acute, and suddenly I felt very alone, and extremely unequipped to know how to help him without Axelle’s2 professional support.
Both Axelle (therapist) and Brida (dancer) are taking a break from the project after 10 years of working together. It’s a big transition, but it’s been going really well. Partly because I’ve known these “kids” since they were teenagers—and there’s a lot of trust. But something has shifted too. With fewer adults in the room, a new dynamic has formed. A quiet kind of cohesion. The students have started picking up more of the load themselves.
Camille tells A, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.”
V jumps in to redirect G when he’s gone rogue again.
Vincent helps explain an exercise when someone doesn’t understand.
My solo project with them isn’t exactly theater, but it borrows from improvisation. Since not all of them are verbal, we’ve been trying to get words out—even if it’s just repeated sounds, gibberish, or intonations. We’ve been working with microphones and analog telephones. When I listen back to the recordings, I’m struck by how much laughter there is. The seven of us are cracking up almost the whole time. Sometimes I think the point of the work is just the fun.
But that day, V wouldn’t join the circle. He lay off to the side, moaning. The group agreed we should pause and take a moment for him. And then, slowly, he slid himself across the floor on his back—just pushing his feet forward—showing us that he wanted us with him.
When he reached us, his body seized. He curled in on himself. I asked:
“Are you in pain?”
“Just feeling sad?”
“Want me to call your mom?”
But he didn’t answer. Then he whispered Mark’s name.
Mark has been with the group since the beginning. He’s 6’5”, wears silver skull rings, has a John Travolta smile and sparkly blue eyes, and a disarming kind of presence. He makes people feel seen.
A few weeks earlier, we’d had one of our deeper group conversations during a microphone exercise. The prompt was simple—describe a favorite object.
Mark held his hands in front of him, cradling air.
“This is my duck,” he said. “My grandma gave it to me before she died.”
His voice softened. “She’s in heaven… which is stupid.”
Then he straightened up, growing angry, clenching his fist. “I want to punch death in the face,” he said. “I want to kill death.”
He’s talked about his grandmother for years. She’s been gone a long time, but her death is still with him. But it’s not stuck—it’s alive. It’s grief without rationalization. He hasn’t softened it. Wanting to kill death, doesn’t it make a strange kind of sense. Don’t we all wish we could?
When V called for Mark, it made sense because Mark is the gravitational center of the group.
I asked, “Mark, do you want to help V?” He lit up.
Together, the group lifted V, whose body resisted every inch, but also clearly wanted our help. He trembled the whole way up. Mark wrapped his arms around him. V leaned in, forehead to Mark’s chest.
“Camille,” V whispered. She stepped forward, touched his cheek, brought her face close to his—noses almost touching—and murmured something I couldn’t hear.
Then I noticed she had tears running down her face. One by one, the others joined. There was no plan. A group hug formed. Totally unscripted.
And soon V was beaming, happily participating, and Mark and Camille were glowing, looking at V and me with great radiant pride. They’d helped their friend, and I could see how much it meant to them.
Afterwards, V sat with Mark, Camille, and Vincent during the break. Usually, they split off in different directions. Not that day. Something had shifted. Mark had his arm draped around his buddy, and they all chatted happily together.
This event woke something up in me, and got me thinking about you and how to be there for you—about what we can do for other people.
I think a lot about when your dad died, and later your brother, and all the ways I didn’t know how to be there. I didn’t come to your dad’s funeral. I think I was afraid to say the wrong thing, so I said nothing at all.
But when your brother died, I got another chance. When we tried to do that memorial service—with the songs and photos—we were trying to create a kind of ritual, an attempt to synthesize the grief, give you some relief. And it helped a little, didn’t it? But it also didn’t really land.
It wasn’t until later, when I found you alone and held you while you sobbed, that something broke through. I felt your grief shaking through my body—in my bones. And afterwards you said: “That was what I needed.” Not the ritual. Just that.
And it struck me. That moment wasn’t intellectual—it didn’t live upstairs. It was downstairs. Body to body.
That’s not where I usually go. I usually go upstairs.
My theater teacher Laura says that sometimes, to really live a scene, you have to convince your body first. That when we live emotions on stage, our bodies believe it’s real. And that we need to move it first, and the mind follows. I used to think ritual was conceptual—a way to digest something abstract. But maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe ritual is how you get the message from downstairs to upstairs. Or the other way around.
Maybe that’s why we keep souvenirs, objects from loved ones. I have a brown button-up shirt my grandmother used to wear. When I put it on, it’s not just memory. It’s contact. The fabric that touched her skin now touching mine. It’s very visceral and kind of powerful. A way to stay close to something that no longer has physicality.
Sara was part of Anim’Bulles for years but recently decided to take a break from the group as she is losing interest in all social interaction. She still comes to solo sessions with me. She’s incredibly smart and deeply articulate, but she’s also slipping further into her own world—more inner jokes, more aggression, more voices.
We’ve shifted from drawing to writing. Sometimes we go out, observe the world, and write our thoughts down. Writing seems to give her clear channel to get the things inside of her out. It soothes her.
She lost her father about six weeks ago.
Yesterday, she broke down again during our writing session. She startled me, yelling suddenly, then dropped her head into her arms, and began sobbing. I thought of that moment with you. I asked if it was okay to put my hand on her arm, but she didn’t respond. Then I sat next to her, unsure what else to do.
When she quieted, I asked if it had been okay when I touched her arm. She said yes. I asked if I could give her a hug. She said yes.
We stayed like that for a long time. Holding each other. Crying softly.
It wasn’t much. But it felt like something.
Afterwards, I brought out my colored pens and said we’d try to scribble it out. We pressed so hard we made holes in the paper. I told her about V, about how we comforted him with touch. I told her it’s the only thing I know how to do.
“We are there for you,” I said. I told her that I wished she’d been there with us at Anim’Bulles—Camille, Mark, V, and all of us—to just be there for her, too.
And I hope she heard it.
I don’t think we’re fixing anything. I don’t think any of us are broken. I just think life is so damn hard. And it feels important to have some moments when it’s less so.
Some moments when we let it all fall apart—and see if the falling apart, when shared, might loosen its hold.
If there’s any hope in all this, it’s not in resolving the absence. Not in explaining death or spiritual mechanics. It’s in replacing what’s gone with something concrete. A hand. A body. A presence. The sense that we’re not facing it alone.
Our brains don’t seem designed for loss. We learn object permanence as toddlers, and then we’re supposed to accept that entire people can vanish? Maybe that’s why we keep souvenirs. Not just to remember—but to reconnect to the physicality of something that was.
In most lives, we get to explain death to a child, knowing their understanding will evolve. But not everyone grows in the same direction. Some of my students may never develop past a child’s capacity for abstraction. Others are experiencing decline. They lose pets, grandparents, even parents—and the question remains blunt and unsolvable. Where did they go?
We all have our ways of trying to get our heads around the inevitable end of life. We dress grief up in theology or metaphor, trying to make sense of it. But emotionally, many of us are standing in the same place as Mark: locked out of a place we’re told exists. Left to accept the impossible—something that was, suddenly isn’t.
“Grandma’s in paradise,” Mark said, “but I’m not allowed to go.”
What he’s asking isn’t “Why did death take her?” but “Why am I locked out?”
Why is death this unfair one-way door?
I’m coming back to Wisconsin soon and I can’t wait to just be a body—not just a voice, not just a letter, I want to sit next to you. To drink cocktails and talk for hours. To appreciate that we are still two bodies who get to hang out together.
Maybe that’s all it is—downstairs and upstairs. Just being together.
I can’t wait to sit with you by the lake, punching death in the face, and telling him how stupid he is.
Yeah. Take that, Death.
Love,
Sandolore
“Toi et Moi” is something we stumbled on together as a group—an easy pair of words we could use to build whole conversations and songs using just you and me, in ways that somehow made kooky, poetic sense to us. I wanted to share this little extract so you can hear just how much fun we’re having—and to give you a little window into our weirdings.
If you are interested reading the short story I wrote for/from Amy, click here: Halving
If you’d like another letter to Amy, how about this one: The Red Boot Stage
Three of my students can’t be named (or photographed), but several participants share the same first letters, I decided to handle it like this. Awkward, right?
Axelle is the founder of Anim’Bulles and is an “éducatrice spécialisé” which roughly translates to something like a psychologist/social worker/autonomy support specialist. We created this non-profit together in 2015.
All we ever want is more time together.
Just one more time... can't wait to punch death with you.
This whole thing is so very strong