Till Death Do Us Dance: Sarah and Nano

Story by Jenny Wonderling

Sarah Stackhouse was a principal dancer and coveted teacher with the internationally renowned Limón Dance Company. She was also a choreographer and member of the American Dance Theatre at Lincoln Center, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, taught at the Juilliard School, the Conservatory of Dance at (SUNY) Purchase College, and the American Dance Festival, as well as wrote numerous essays on dance. She spent her adult life traveling the globe while based in New Paltz with her husband, Nano Seeber, in the same home where they raised their son, Roel Seeber, who is now also a professional dancer. “They have both always been fiercely independent and career-minded, frequently leaving for long stints abroad separately, or when I was younger, with me in tow,” Roel shared. “Yet my dad stopped traveling and working. She needed him and he showed up completely.”

On January 7th of this year, at 87 years old, Sarah Stackhouse died the way she had always lived: surrounded by love, being a generous teacher and relishing Life’s experiences with curiosity, including death. “She died with a smile,” her husband said, honoring her. “Death was kind to her. She embraced it. And she made it beautiful for all of us, for everybody who participated in caring for her and being with her to the end. I think we were all elevated from this event.”

This is a story about death, but mostly, it’s a story about living with exuberance and receptivity. Everyone will die; we all know this, yet many work hard to fight against it to the very end, including those who have lived long and extraordinary lives. When Sarah got her diagnosis, rather than fearing or thwarting death, she immediately accepted it and invited those around her to do the same. In accepting it, she and her family embraced the subtle gifts of greater presence and stillness that the last year of her life granted, even though she had been previously defined by and expressed herself through her physicality and its expression.

Claudia Bauer of the NY Times recently wrote, “Mr. Limón was already one of the 20th century’s most influential choreographers when Ms. Stackhouse joined his company in 1958. Her virtuosic dance technique, natural charisma and compelling acting perfectly suited his flowing movement style and abstract narrative works, which are still performed by his company and many others around the world.”

What defines us? If how the world sees us and we see ourselves are taken away, can we still find fulfillment?

Roel, Sarah’s son, explained, “My mom had an incredible quality of altering expectations. I think there’s usually an expectation that Life is and will continue to be a certain way. She was such an active and physical person. However, she found she could reestablish herself in a new perspective on life, as in, “Life is different today than it was yesterday. And it’s different today than it was years ago.” So she just kept reestablishing. She did this through the people who visited and reached out to her this past year and through my dad, to whom she was so grateful daily for the care that he was giving her.”

This reestablishing and graceful acceptance felt radical to many who were touched by her example and even inspired Nano and Roel to talk openly about what Death can be, though the loss is so recent. Writer and philosopher Alain de Botton once wisely wrote, “At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.” In this final and perhaps most beautiful oeuvre of Sarah Stackhouse, despite her physical limitations, she managed to choreograph a journey of glorious flowing into and with Life’s changes. By so doing, she allowed for deep and intimate connection, completion and joy for everyone who shared this last dance with her.

As a long-time family friend, I was lucky to spend several intimate afternoons with Sarah this past year. I visited under the auspices of bringing her and Nano soup, but I couldn’t wait to share time with them. With each visit, I was able to drop into Sarah’s experience, which felt more like bliss than suffering, more like surrender than a fearful thwarting of the inevitable. She may have appeared to be frail and very thin, her breathing labored, but she was power-packed with wisdom, humor and a deep interest in the world around her to the end. It was as if she had merely been distilled down to her essence. She made every word count. The clarity of her language and the wisdom that came through was profound. She asked meaningful questions and shared thoughts openly about life, the earth, love, the powerful alchemy and healing that creativity grants the individual and the world, and so much more.

Each sentence was finely honed as if between visits and pauses, she was pondering and pondering some more. In fact, this is exactly what she was doing from her beautiful perch above the trees, next to a large window, watching the seasons, natural world and light of each day shift and change. Perfectly still, there was indeed always movement. Sarah delighted in all of it and however much time she would be gifted to move more slowly and subtly than she ever had, to notice from an even deeper place.

Roel said, “Everyone would come over to say hi to her and they would end up talking. There she was listening to their stuff and people would end up leaving feeling like, ‘Wait, I came in to check in on her,’ but really, they got checked up on.”

And it was also more than that. A visit with Sarah gifted others the rare opportunity to sit with a being who was between worlds, contemplating what was most essential to carry forward on the journey of living and dying in the right alignment. She was so caring, calming, validating and wise that she offered a balm to the spirit (rather than the other way around, as Roel shared) and a deep reminder of what most matters. Even when she spoke of heartbreak, particularly regarding humans’ impact on the earth or any of Life’s more difficult subjects, she could share her ideas peppered with easy laughter because she had made peace with all of it and understood about Life’s resilience. And she didn’t fear Death because she didn’t fear Life. She lived so fully and lovingly to the end that she merely danced to the other side, revealing to all those connected to her that that, too, could merely be a continuous extension of a life well lived.

What if we lived in a culture that accepted Death without fear?

“People are so avoidant of death that many can’t even say the word,” Nano shared. “Instead, they say, ‘passed away…or crossed over, or dearly departed.’ I have a lot of respect for Death now and that was what I shared at the cemetery: Death is a part of Life and we have to respect it. My brother Matt reminded me that there is a point by Saint Francis of Assisi who called out at the moment of his death in the 1200s, ‘Welcome, Sister Death!’ leaving an open window into how we can reflect on and relate to Death without fear.”
Nano continued, “Francis of Assisi might not have been a saint, but he was a guy who loved nature and wrote The Canticle of the Creatures. In it, he spoke about Sister Water, Mother Earth, about the birds, the little animals and the big animals as our siblings. Then he talked about Sister Death in that sphere. And this is what my brother pointed out about Death: that we need to be friendly and open to it, like a sister. I can see now how that’s extremely important. I think we’re missing out big-time if we approach Life without including Death. It becomes a serious problem later on when you or somebody you love is facing it. So it’s very important to get acquainted with Death, to accept it, and to love it because Life cannot exist without it. So, it’s a logical, simple statement, but it seems to be forgotten. Precious life and precious death are important because they are an integral part of living. It’s almost synonymous with it.”

I asked if he could explain this further.

“Life is beautiful, right?” Nano continued, “And it can also be at the end, but it won’t be unless you accept that. But if you do accept it, even that can be yours. But you have to accept it; that’s the contract. In terms of Sarah, Death was kind to her. She embraced it. And she made it beautiful for all of us, for everybody who participated in caring for her and being with her to the end. I think we were all elevated from this event.” And too, certainly, Death is easier to embrace in someone who has lived and loved to the ripe age of 87 years and left quite an inspiring legacy.

This quote by George Bernard Shaw well encapsulates how Sarah Stackhouse danced throughout her days in so many forms: “This is the true joy in Life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my Life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in Life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

Sarah Stackhouse was no feverish, selfish little clod. In fact, dance critic Jennifer Dunning once shared this about Sarah: “Her gifts have been forged in the fire of dance history.”

But can anyone dance their way into death?

Nano explained, “In a practical sense, we are programmed to fight. We have all these medicines and devices, all these ways of fighting illness and even Death. For about a year and a half, I was thinking about Sarah’s situation as if I was in a battle. But actually, the process with Sarah taught me that’s the wrong way to look at the experience of someone’s death. It is not a battle. I didn’t ‘lose a battle.’ And if you put it in those terms, you will lose. Death comes and takes you by the hand, and you have to be wise enough to follow as necessary. And so it is a sister, as Francis of Assisi said. It’s not a fight; it’s an embrace by nature. You had a good Life and now it’s time to be hugged by Death, accepted. And she was dying with a smile to the very last day. That’s powerful. The last gesture in her Life was a smile. A hug to Roel and a smile. That is amazing, and that tells me something powerful.”

Touched by hands…made with love

The first time I visited Sarah, she was 85 lbs and breathing with the help of an oxygen machine. None of that stopped her from lovingly taking one tired rose after the other out of a vase that sat next to her bed, carefully avoiding the thorns, clipping the bottom of each stem, and placing it back into the vase until her job was complete. She had previously explained she wasn’t feeling well that day, yet there she was, propping up those roses and giving them a little more living. I told her, “What it seems to me is that even though things are difficult for you right now, Sarah, your body and breathing are challenging, yet beauty is still so important to you…beauty and nature and celebrating that.” I asked her how she maintained that and what role beauty has in the human experience, in her opinion. She spoke then of how the things the hands touch and create have the unique imprint of a person’s soul, thoughts and creativity and, therefore, hold more meaning. One glance around any room in the Seeber-Stackhouse residence makes it easy to sense the potency of what she means. Handmade pottery, paintings, hand-woven rugs and baskets, and carefully chosen artisan-made mementos of their travels and a wide circle of friends are everywhere, set against the wood details of their home that Nano also built.

On the second visit, I found Sarah knitting, or to be more exact, wrestling a tangled ball of yarn in the hopes of knitting. That ignited another conversation about the importance of creative expression through the body and the hands specifically. This time, I recorded her rather than scrambling to write in my journal. She said, “The hands are very important because they can deal with the smaller things. When you make something or sew up a hole in pants or whatever, it’s a product of somebody’s mind that has reached out through the hands. And that action allows them to think and feel differently. That doesn’t mean everybody should be out making pottery. Still, the value of this body moving into some material, even if it’s a relationship with some material like clay, teaches you something. It probably isn’t perfect, but it’s a product of something rich. And what you create reveals this: “I am human and I have all these things in me that I need to move forward with my life and with my thinking mind.”

She looked at a generic glass bottle on a nearby shelf and pointed, then continued speaking, “I don’t know who made that bottle. But I do know who made that star over there on the wall. All this stuff that is made by hand gives me a sense, a feeling. And I know that whoever works hard at making something just to get money from it, that thing is going to lack the richness of somebody’s heart and mind. It’s clear that with these little machines like iPhones, all we need are thumbs, but that means that the other four fingers are going to disappear. That’s one’s mind disappearing,” she cautioned.

I asked her, “What gave you a sense of permission to pursue a life of creativity, Sarah? Was your family in the arts?” In her usual practical, measured way, she procured an answer as if it had been waiting to be released.

“My parents were both very crafty, even to the point of artistry. I have things that my mother made and things that my father made. They appreciated the making of things. They appreciated beauty, not products. The honesty of the product is much more important than what it would bring as money. I think taste is related to the care, the thought and sometimes the training, but not really. What’s important is that human beings take the time to look at what they’re doing, to push themselves a bit more, to love doing that. Also, to not be annoyed by the problems it might create for us, that we then have to solve. I haven’t done that much searching on that one, but I think it’s very important that somehow or another, as a human race, we allow ourselves to shower more attention to the body and what the body can do. We need the body to keep it here in our world and experience, to teach us how to endure, produce and be human.”

She paused, thinking. “You know, we can all look and find out what’s wrong or muse about what’s gone. Somehow or other, we have to understand how we can move it all forward. I believe creativity is a way to help people from being afraid of exposing themselves so they can get on with a richer life. It’s a very sorry situation when people are not able to look into the faces of others around them and understand them on a human level. Not what they dress like and not what they look like, but to see them as us. You know, like, ‘Guess what? You are me, and I am you….'”

I said, tears of amazement streaming down my face as they often did when we were together, “I believe that, yes. People feel so separate and so alone, right?”

She answered again without delay, “Yes, I think creativity is the key.”

Love is an action

I asked Sarah, “If you could give a gentle roadmap for people who are trying to navigate love at this time with so many distractions and the ability to shop for love on a screen, what would you say? What kept you going, even though, at times, it was difficult? You are two creative, complex people who have been very strong-willed. As we all know, love brings up all our challenges, yet somehow, you have stayed devoted to the relationship. How did you do that?”

She said, “Well, I think we were lucky in that way. I’m so grateful to my parents, who were very much of that period during the Second World War when, for instance, you didn’t throw anything away. You used everything. You kept everything because you knew you would probably need it. So that idea that you keep at it, you keep at whatever and figure it out, also applies to Life. I learned that’s what you have to do. But if you find some way to distract yourself from doing that thinking and taking that care, then you bypass the chance to grow up. Anyway, my parent’s idea was, ‘You keep at it, no matter what. You keep at it, and you figure it out. Or you just keep at it.’ That is what my parents had in their DNA. But I think that creativity and imagination allow you to go into that other world of figuring out life, figuring out how you can endure and move ahead in some way and hopefully, that’s an interesting way.”

“The word ‘love‘ doesn’t mean anything anymore. I mean… ‘l love you! Love you. I loooove you. LOVE IT!'” Sarah mocked in a sing-songy way. “It loses all of its punch. It loses any meaning at all. So I kept grinding this through my head and I realized that the word love doesn’t really apply to emotion. I think love is an action. And I see that happening with Nano and me during these recent days together. We’ve always had a little bit of tension…I mean, a lot of tension. We’ve had times when we’re both being ourselves so much that we forget not to be ourselves and be part of who we are together. So during this time, we came to the point and with Roel, too…when we realized that we were in a loving state, which means we were in a doing state. Nano has had to go from being what he was to what I needed and what we needed so that love became an action. So love can become something that twists you into a shape that is completely, or almost completely and richly ‘motional.’ And if you follow that through, you might arrive at an emotional state.”

“That’s profound,” I said, awed.

She went on: “In our previous life, I was always waiting for Nano to say I love you, but he never said I love you. I realized that was also my family background, one which was very straightforward. My parents never talked about emotion. So, in my relationship with Nano, we didn’t arrive at a point where feelings were able to come alive and I’d been sort of wandering around because I hadn’t yet found a way to make this a reality for myself. But we have both made a very profound change in the way we relate to each other and that’s amazed me for a while.”

“When did that shift begin to happen?”

Sarah said, “Oh, probably the minute we went to the emergency room. I think that he felt afraid, which is a really important emotion, even more important than what we call love. When you feel that fear, you start processing the fear and begin to learn how to deal with the fear instead of running away from it. Or pretending it doesn’t exist. Because the guy (Nano) is working so fast and so hard now at something with which he is so unfamiliar…having to cook three meals a day, having to remember all this stuff that’s important for me. ‘Do you have your pills? Did you do that?’ It’s his actions that kept him thinking.”

The incredible silence

“My dad gave her such incredible daily care,” Roel said. “Every single day. He stopped all the things he was doing as a seismologist and all the rest and just took care of her, cooking three meals a day, which wasn’t at all his thing. ‘Till death do us part?’ They truly lived it. He hadn’t always been out in the world, yet he came back, stayed home and took care of her. With the help of all the neighbors, this incredible community that loved her, they took care of her, championed her and engaged her intellectually so she wasn’t by herself. It was all really important and it wasn’t a one-way street.”

He continued, “I don’t know if happy or content is the right word, but she was still living fully despite being stuck in bed and on oxygen. She didn’t give up; she kept being curious. I think that curiosity is one of the things I loved most about my mom–how playful, curious and engaged she was. She was never bored.”

When Sarah was alive, I had asked her about any spiritual orientation she may have had. She said, “My guidance has always come from inside. I hadn’t thought about it in my Life before. Now I’m starting to think about it and better understand what is inside of us and how the richness has to come from inside of people. And that takes so much energy and wisdom and fear. It has to have fear and it has to have a lot of difficulty because if you don’t have to fear, if you don’t go through periods where it seems like you can’t move on, then you don’t figure out how to move on. I think we spend so much time with the little kids in this era, trying to avoid them having any difficulties in Life. And you cheat them of themselves; it’s a very sorry thing. But at the same time, you’re telling them, ‘Oh, good job, good job,’ no matter what they do. ‘Good job,’ but they don’t have to deal with any kind of reality. We don’t ever say that wasn’t a really good job. Let’s look at that as a culture because it’s a sorry thing and we’ve wiped out the things that allow us to grow up that force us to grow up. And we don’t learn how to be human in the end.”

I asked Roel if she had discussed the notion of spirituality further with him. He said, “Her creative practice was her spiritual practice. She didn’t discuss what she thought about what would happen after. Life was for living. Death? I think she thought she would figure it out when she got there without too much concern. But I do remember watching my grandfather die, and he simply did not want to, as if Life was being taken from him. He never stopped wanting to live. I saw a different quality in my mom in the end. She was like, ‘No, this is it. I’m moving on.’ There’s usually a fear in that unknown, the solitude of Death, that there’s no one on that journey with you and you cross the threshold by yourself. Yet I saw her do that with this courage and commitment and that was so beautiful. And we were blessed to be able to be with her for three or four days afterward. They chose a ‘natural’ burial, so no one came in and took her away from us before we were ready to bring her to the (Rosendale Plains) Cemetery down the road.”

Roel added, “So she remained with us. We put her in the studio and made this beautiful environment for her. It was just gorgeous and peaceful, and people could come and go and be with her. It highlighted for me this interesting quality of a person’s passing: after a person stops breathing and their heart stops beating, they don’t stop living immediately. There’s a residue. There’s a continuity and a transition time that is amazing to be with and it made me feel sad for all of the people not able to spend those closing moments, that transition time with a loved one. How lucky we were that we got to spend that time with her and to have various people come over and remember.

“To sit with her and feel the connections that she had with people, still there with people while they transitioned and they helped her transition…they transitioned with her. It’s hard to know what exactly was going on, but laughter, tears, stories and the wealth of emotion that can go on within the space held in this incredible silence, the incredible silence that she was creating. Unresponsive, but still there.”

You are cordially invited to Sarah Stackhouse Memorial
May 4th, 2024, from 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm
St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery
131 E 10th St, New York, NY 10003
Click HERE for more information

 

Featured Photo by Betti Franceschi
Photos courtesy of the Limón Dance Foundation and Nils Schlebusch

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