I’ve been advised to sit at the back, near an exit, with tissues, for Solène Weinachter’s dance-theatre show AFTER ALL. In the event, it turns out that I don’t need the exit, though I do need the back seat, and the tissues. The piece begins by recalling the cremation of Solène’s uncle Bob in southern France. She evokes the scene in some detail – the chairs, the coffin, the curtains – but my mind is already superimposing another scene onto this one, where a group of us had gathered, nine days ago now, at a crematorium in southwest England to mark the burning of the body of my mother, Hilary Ann Roy.

Such superimpositions recur throughout these three days of performances at the Spring Forward dance platform in Gorizia/Nova Gorica (Italy/Slovenia). Whenever I am in the audience, and so with no other task to occupy me (talk, walk, write, eat), thoughts and images of my mother come to me, unbidden. Any upright object – a pillar, a microphone stand – can become a screen onto which my mind projects the photo we had used at the cremation, where she stands in a moss-green forest, a little like a tree herself, dappled, weather-worn and a touch lopsided, her face tilting upwards like a leaf towards the light.

I’ve been reviewing shows at this festival for a decade now, but I’m clearly in no state to do so here, because what am I even seeing? This year, then, demands a different kind of account. This time, it’s personal.

The festival is the first time since my mother’s death that I am meeting people unconnected to her. They are here for entirely other reasons – as am I, of course, but none of these reasons feel quite real, or quite right. I remember my Auntie Krishna telling me, two days earlier, that after such a death you feel like you’re acting, and it would take some time before things became ‘real’. Throughout the day preceding the performances, I have a role that I have played before – as a mentor for our annual dance writing workshop – and I act it out pretty well, I think. But from the next morning it’s mostly improvisation, and I don’t know what to do, or how to be. I spend the first show with my eyes leaking sporadically, wondering if I will have to explain afterwards that no, it was not the performance moving me to tears.

Right after that it’s the first lunch break, and suddenly I know that I cannot act my way through the hellos and how-are-yous, the hugs and kisses and smiles; nor can I ‘find my motivation’, as actors put it, to participate in the networking that such social niceties constitute. My feet walk me out of the building and into a park outside, where I sit down on a bench. My face sinks into my palms. My spine folds over my thighs and my torso heaves as it clutches at my lungs. I can hear the jagged noises I am making, but this doesn’t feel like me, these don’t feel like my feelings. It’s more like some passing beast that has stopped to maul me, because it can, and because I cannot withstand it.

After some time, I become aware of a touch upon my knee. I raise my head, and the blurred face of a woman comes into focus. She is in her forties I guess, with her teenage daughter (I guess) standing a little behind. She crouches, so that she is looking up to me, not down on me, and somewhere I register this small courtesy. Va bene? she asks gently, and in some approximation to Italian I say: I am okay. My mother is dead. I need some moments alone. Thank you for your kindness. She nods, and she and her daughter move on, and let me be. So too does the beast. A trickle of gratitude seeps into my emptiness. It was as if an angel had paused as she passed by. Thank you, dear stranger.

I return to the festival not quite the same as I had left. When people say how are you, I allow myself to answer I honestly don’t know, and to tell them, briefly, why. What I find is this: most people are kind, even if some wrap it in awkwardness. Also: most people have had experiences that echo, though cannot mirror, my own.

I learn the same lesson watching Solène’s piece. At first I make it all about me, but stories keep emerging from the stage that are simply not mine – and I listen. There is humour that I don’t recognise – and still find funny. There are others in the audience who cry, or laugh, or don’t – for reasons of their own. Later, I tell Solène about the shift the piece had made in me. It was as if I were closed in upon myself in a dark room, and had gradually become aware of a window onto the world outside. I was not yet ready to go there, or even open it, but was glad to know it would be there when I was. Solène is delighted to hear this, and offers me something in return. She says: Your time in the room will end, but it is also precious. Appreciate it. I cherish the thought. Thank you, Solène.

*

The next day, in Dances Like a Bomb by Irish company Junk Ensemble, there comes a moment when the two performers play a game they call ‘ways of dying’, taking turns to play-act scenes of drowning, lethal injection, immolation and disembowelment. As it happens, a death scene is already playing in my head (it’s recurrent, so this is no great coincidence). I am in the kitchen, and my mother is sitting at the breakfast table, talking on speakerphone to my sister. In mid-sentence, she slumps forward and a guttural sound escapes her. I catch her as she slips sideways, and help her to the floor. I run to fetch a blanket and pillow, thinking she has fainted. I hear two or three more of those exhalations, spaced some time apart, before I register that there has been no inhalation. We try resuscitation, then the ambulance crew arrives to take over with equipment, drips and drugs; but they cannot revive her, and after a designated time they pronounce her dead. On every replay of this sequence, I understand something that I did not at the time: she was probably already dead at the table, and certainly before she reached the floor.

Back in the theatre, a concerned colleague worries if ‘ways of dying’ has been traumatic for me. Not at all, I say truthfully. It seemed to have little to do with death in fact (from which there is no getting up and trying another way), and a lot to do with death in fantasy. That’s an observation, not a criticism, and I make it because the distinction seems important. Facts care nothing for our feelings; fantasy springs from them. The thought reminds me of another dance festival, ten years ago in the northernmost tip of Norway, where the monumental indifference of the vast arctic to our tiny dances had lodged a piercing thought in me: what if all art, all culture, is less a means to explore the world than a way to shield us from it?

‘Ways of dying’ certainly feels like that: a kind of cultural clothing that allows us to approach reality only by protecting us from it. Perhaps we need such layers, but right now I am very much appreciating the thought that while we may be significant to each other, to the world we are superfluous. Back in the park, for example, what had returned me to my senses was not the passing angel but the world beyond her, beyond me. I became alert, and therefore alive, to a gnarl in a tree trunk, to the chirp of finches, to a dog snuffling at a post before peeing on it, to stones and skies. I was grateful for their existence, as indifferent to my self and my stories as would be a mountain, a river, or a raindrop.

*

People say that we are born into the world and leave it when we die, but in truth I think we are born out of the world, and when we die we go back into it. The world, then, is a kind of mother to us – where we come from – and in dying what we lose is our differentiation, our separate form: once we were a river, now we are sea. Perhaps therein lies the strange solace we derive from contemplating the non-human: we face the life of the world and efface, to some degree, the life of the self.

Writer and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom contends that the human encounter with death – and to be clear, he means our mortality, not our murderousness – can awaken us to a more profound and proportionate sense of our selves in relation to the world. Such moments prise open the fissures between normality and reality: we become less entangled in how things are and more aware that things are. Less interested in ‘ways of dying’, for example, and more conscious of our mortal condition: that we die. Inevitably, this makes us ponder both our utility, and our futility. That is, our ways of living.

*

At this juncture, my writing stalls. Up to here, the text has felt true and purposeful: it is good and right that an encounter with death leads to an encounter with ways of living. But each time I try to move on, the sentences disperse, they become adrift and directionless. I get nowhere, and end up deleting the text. Eventually, I decide to stop trying. I decide to go nowhere. I guess I am not yet ready to leave the room.

From within it, one image and one idea come to me, and stay with me.

The image is the one of my mother among the trees, which I find immeasurably consoling. In it, she is not only one unique and inimitable life, she is also part of a living forest. We planted a tree in her memory, in a forest garden near her home, and I discover that I am looking forward to watching it grow and change, in its own time.

The idea is this: finitude. That all things must end seems to me the most precious idea – the most precious reality, in fact – for us to awaken to, and live with. Let us be less wasteful, then, less polluting, and so tread lighter upon the world through which we pass, whether we are producing or consuming or communicating, whether we are dancing or writing.

This year, I ended my talk on dance writing with the following advice from one of my favourite books, First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran:

Most paragraphs are longer than they need to be, likewise most chapters. Most books go on for fifty pages longer than they should. We forget all this because it is less effort to speak than to listen. Writing is not a sermon, and at some point, sooner than we think, we should stop. 

‘Sooner than we think, we should stop.’ The words weigh differently upon me now.

I should stop here too – but just like Solène at the end of her performance pleading for just one more minute before the lights go down, I need to ask for one more sentence.

Thank you, mum.