The Erotic Is An Antidote to Death
Touch, sex, bodies and loss
Listen to this episode.
I’m home by myself, listening to a podcast. The hosts are telling funny stories, and one of them makes me laugh. I mean really laugh.
You know the hysterics that scrunch your face up, get caught in the throat, make you struggle to breathe? Those. But as I’m recovering, a curious thing happens:
My laughter, my silly joy, turns a corner. Am I sobbing? Oh.
The sobs are heaving and deep, like they are being scooped out from the inside. I’ve always found the word “weeping” a tad Victorian, the way a person might say they’re sleeping with someone they’re fucking. I am not weeping. Weeping sands the edges off, makes the act seem more gentle and poetic. This is not that.
My sobs are jagged and sharp, pieces of glass I’m trying to cough up onto the floor.
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Lately, my pain has been asserting itself in random times and places. It’s because I’m losing my dad, who is dying of cancer. Last March, we walked the cobblestone streets of Guanajuato, Mexico, a village shaped like Whoville. Think: miniature valley with a town square at the bottom, colorful houses and trees and stairs scaling the sides. At night, you can look down to the street lights below, unobstructed by towers because there aren’t any. Just squat little buildings, so the effect is like peering down into a bowl of stars.
There were fireworks on our last night, which also happened to be my dad’s birthday. I have a video of him from the restaurant, candles lighting up his grin. He is 76. But when I watch this video, I see 10 year-old him, 5 year-old him. It’s in the eyes, the child he once was.
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Since the official diagnosis arrived three impossibly short months ago, my dad’s world has shrunken down to a bed. That’s where I visit him, hold his hand. I stroke his cheek sometimes too. “That feels good,” he said to me last week, and I was relieved, because it was a bit of a risk. I’d never stroked his cheek before, but I saw my mom doing it and decided it was ok.
And it was an interesting sensation, his beard against the backs of my fingers. Softer than I’d anticipated. Almost like a horse — coarse, but smooth. He’s always had thick hair.
I had the thought touching him that I’ve had several times during this process, which is: I’m more physically sensitive now.
More embodied, oddly.
It’s as though my dad’s body is slipping away, while mine becomes more insistent.
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Embodiment: a word that sounds both legit and woo.
Yes, it’s a real thing; no, it’s not a linear process. At least it hasn’t been for me. Up until this point I thought of myself as quite an embodied person. I now border on primal. The swings of internal bodily urge and total mute silence could be the result of grief, or, the result of being in my 40s. The science is fuzzy on both. It’s a strange portal.
This is what it’s like:
One half of the month, I feel nothing. The hot baths I love during winter don’t feel soothing or calming, just hot. This tends to be the period I am most realistic about my dad’s situation. We’re not going to travel together anymore, ok. The median life expectancy for American men is 76, ok. He has a DNR, ok.
It’s a time of profound acceptance. Also a time of unrelenting self-pity. Turns out I’m the first daughter in the world who’s ever lost her father. Can you believe that?
The other half of the month, I feel everything. All sensation gets turned up louder. Including pleasure.
For example. I have a new, bodily relationship with music. Drums vibrate all the way down. I dance in the kitchen with earbuds jammed in, something I wasn’t particularly prone to before, but the feeling is ecstatic. It’s like I was just hearing music previously, melodies bouncing right off my ear drums, but whole songs are now crossing the membrane barrier and reverberating within. Changing me on a cellular level.
Also, my sex life has never been better.
I stumble across (/actively search for) Internet content of women talking about grief and sex, and I find them on Substack and Instagram and Reddit. All of my people, channeling a distinctly erotic energy now that they’re confronted with death. Speaking of woo.
I feel like that woman who had the stroke and then the bodily merge with her shower stall and then with all of humanity and then a TED Talk. I am an ever-expanding pool of depression and sensation, and have never felt this helpless or powerful. Shiva. Freyja. Pick your creator/destroyer deity. It’s a common duality, and I look various gods up on the Internet, trying to understand why death is making me feel more sexual.
Because I am masturbating a lot right now. I’m listening to more audio erotica than usual.
In short: I’m horny.
Which sometimes makes me feel very mystical, Freyja in fertility garb, and other times makes me feel animal, like I’m turning over every rock just in case there’s some dopamine I can scrape off the bottom, licking my fingers as I go.
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Should I feel weird about this? I ask myself sometimes, on days I’ve both cried my body into exhaustion and given it consecutive orgasms.
I recently had one that pinged all over my pelvic floor, the type of orgasm that moves, surprising me and delighting me with where it decided to squeeze and release. When it finally finished, I laid there breathing, trying to integrate.
Should I feel weird about this?
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On Instagram, I feel reassured by something Rebecca Woolf wrote. Like me, Rebecca writes about sex, but she’s also familiar with loss.
“…it only makes sense for grief to trigger urges that are at once carnal, salacious, animal. That what I was feeling was probably incredibly common in the wild. Chemical, even.”
Yeah. That.
Another woman wrote in the comment section of Rebecca’s post,
“experiencing the death of a loved one is so surreal that when I lost my parent I just needed to feel like I was alive and in my body.”
Aliveness. Maybe that’s what I’m after.
Maybe I’m composting this loss little by little into something new each time I have sex or masturbate. Some unnameable erotic spark that shoots through the sky in a journey to becoming what, exactly? No one knows.
Maybe I’m just expanding.
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The facility where my dad is currently has bad lighting, overhead fluorescents that sting the eyeballs. My mom found a tiny lamp built into the wall in his room, and turns this on as an alternative. She’s always adjusting the blinds when I come in for a visit, as picky about indoor lighting conditions as I am.
“We spoke with a doctor about hospice today,” she told me last time I was there, filling me in on the latest. I watch her feed my dad lunch, all the foods soft, easily yielding. Mashed potatoes. Jell-O. He asks for water and I’m closer to his cup; I tilt the straw to his lips.
The three of us muse about various timelines, different scenarios. Would it feel good to be at home until, you know? Or a fully-staffed place? Maybe not this place, but a better one. With better lighting.
I start my car to drive home, cue up a song I’ve been listening to lately.
There’s a lyric about hands on the body.
I’m watching the road, thinking about saying goodbye, thinking about hands on my body, thinking about how different I’ll feel without a father, thinking about touch, thinking about sex, thinking about how funny he would find this, thinking he’d roll his eyes and laugh at his daughter, he had to go to Catholic school!, thinking there’s a community inside of me and one of us is a scared child, another a wanton deity.
I pull into the driveway, change the Bluetooth from my car to my earbuds. Hit “play” again.
I continue the song in the kitchen, swaying my hips and opening the refrigerator, selecting only ingredients that take a long time to cook.
Tolly Moseley writes , a newsletter about sex, culture, and being a human.
I will write a full comment later today, but here I offer my thanks to Tolly for joining me as guest author on Inner Life. Take a look and be surprised.
A touching essay -- thank you. Grief impacts me in precisely the opposite way. Desire is a sign of healing, a feeling of opening once again to possibility.