Why I Chose The Lord of the Dance for Corrie

When we’re teenagers and in our twenties, we believe we know everything about life.

Life deals out its understandings much like a dealer with cards. The specific cards come at different times during our human experience, and there isn’t any guarantee we’ll get the cards we want for the win. Our insight arrives at different times and places in our mortal existence.

Life moves forward even when some of us experience moments when we want to shut the door on the world.

We hope to shut out time.

But whether we like it or not, time grabs the paddle of the canoe.

Weddings occur with the natural celebration we associate with April, May, June, and July. A new birth occurs. Graduations return to normal where parents sit in a stadium or chairs, and they watch their babies now six-feet-tall walk across the stage.

We dance in those times.

These are the triumphs and gold of our mortality.

Then there are the other parts of our mortal existence. The ones we wished we’d never known, and they come at different times and places.

Such times cause us to pull back from society, and wish we could do the same with time.

Life for ourselves and others will move forward sometimes at a pace we despise.

When my beloved angel and daughter, Corrie, earned her wings almost one year ago this week; I did not know how I’d go forward. It was beyond my comprehension in the immediate aftermath of a life event that shattered my being and caused my heart to explode.

Even in the moment when I was reminded of life’s porcelain fragility, I carried a small candle of hope.

I chose two hymns for Corrie’s celebration of life on June 3, 2020. One was “The Lord of the Dance,” and when the funeral director said they hadn’t heard of the song nor had it in their hymnal, we were able to ask someone to play and sing it from my parents’ church.

You don’t have to have one ounce of faith to connect with the song’s message of the progression of time, the heights of life, and the darker corners we wish never existed.

I chose “The Lord of the Dance” for those reasons, and because my daughter loved to dance.

Corrie loved to dance with me.

I adored the lyrics, the music, and the message more than any sermon through which I’d ever slept, as I had a habit of doing as a small child, or written parts of novels and poems.

“I danced in the morning

when the world was begun,

and I danced in the moon,

and the stars and the sun,

and I came down from heaven

and I danced on earth,

at Bethlehem,

I had my birth.

“Lord of the dance” by the dubliners

We’re going to meet people and come to places where we have to swallow the hard tonic that they do not care, or do not want to hear about certain life experiences.

It happens when people scroll past.

It happens when people try to awkwardly escape a conversation.

It is what causes some, who’ve experienced such loss, to pull away from people completely. They rather not deal with that cold part of existence.

But the song reminds us …

“I danced for the scribe

and the pharisee

but they would not dance

and they would follow me …

“The Lord of the dance”

In life, we also have to learn the tough lesson to stop caring what others think. Because if you constantly worry what others’ think, you cannot take care of yourself. You cannot get yourself to a point where you’re okay, and you’re in a position to help people.

My daughter, Corrie, would want me to write about the experience to hopefully help someone and share. She’d want me to talk about her, and not lock her memories away in the caverns of my mind.

Trust me. When I try to delegate her memories, my heartbreak, and all she is to me to a prison inside; she laughs somewhere. She appears whether I like it or not, and I’m forced to see her in the moments when I tell myself to put her aside because I must function.

When I saw a flower blooming outside our house, I heard, “Look at me, Mommy.”

When I took Hayes, my son, swimming and I did laps, two girls Corrie’s age did their little gymnastics meets dance moves. One wore a Wonder Woman bathing suit, and Corrie arrived center stage in my mind.

I didn’t want it at all.

But I heard her laughing.

The song slows down meaningfully on the verse:

“I danced on a Friday

when the sky turned black

It’s hard to dance

with the devil on your back.

They buried my body

and they thought I’d gone,

But I am the Dance,

And I still go on.”

“The Lord of the dANCE.”

Time does not stop even if I would trade my soul to get back every single moment and day of Corrie’s life before May 27, 2020.

As the song says, “They cut me down/ And I leapt up high/ I am the life/ That’ll never, never die …”

“I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me …”

We cannot stop time. Sometimes we cannot be a part of celebrations around us.

We can make a choice even if it is not what people like or makes them uncomfortable.

We can dance even if it is not the same as it was before.

Because my daughter lives in me, and she is a “life that’ll never, never die.”