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Why We Regret Not Dancing More: What Confronting Mortality Teaches Us About Embodiment

 
When Carolyn Gregoire thinks about the regrets people share at the end of life, one theme comes up again and again: they wish they had danced more. They wish they had enjoyed their bodies—not just for what they could do, but for the simple fact of being alive inside them.
 
Dancer
This insight eventually led Carolyn to a weekly ritual in New York City: pulling on a bodysuit, hopping on the L train, and joining a lively mix of strangers for 5Rhythms, a movement meditation class held in an old Bowery church. Created by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s, 5Rhythms blends expressive movement with awareness practices. For Carolyn, it’s a place where self‑consciousness dissolves and aliveness returns.

Roth once wrote, “When we dance, we wake up.”
Carolyn felt exactly that—especially after a period of personal loss that made life’s impermanence impossible to ignore.

How Mortality Reawakens the Body

During her own season of grief, Carolyn found herself longing to dance again. She’d grown up with ballet and rhythmic gymnastics, but over the years had drifted away from movement that felt joyful and free. What surprised her was how deeply this longing surfaced once she began facing the reality that time is finite.
She later learned this reaction is common.
Hospice chaplain Kerry Eagan writes about the way dying people often speak of their bodies with a new tenderness. They don’t just lament illnesses or physical decline—they lament missing the pure, sensory experience of being alive in a body.
Patients recall small, vivid memories:
  • the feeling of water during a first swim
  • the warmth of holding a child
  • the sweep of music through a moving body
And then comes the refrain:
If I had only known, I would have danced more.
Dancing, Eagan notes, symbolizes a kind of freedom many don’t recognize until it’s nearly gone.

Why So Many of Us Stop Dancing

When Carolyn began interviewing people about death, she asked death doula and writer Darnell Lamont Walker what he’d regret most if he died tomorrow. His answer was immediate: “I wish I had learned ballet.”
His response reaffirmed something she had already begun to see—thinking about death often brings us back not to careers or achievements, but to the small things that make life feel vibrant.
So why do so many people stop moving in the ways that make them feel alive?
A few reasons stand out:

1. The Body Holds Pain

Physical and emotional trauma can make inhabiting the body feel overwhelming. Movement becomes something to avoid rather than a source of joy.

2. Adult Life Pulls Us Into Our Heads

Daily demands, productivity pressure, and routine can disconnect us from the sensory world. Many people gradually forget what it feels like to be present in their own skin.

3. We Inherit Cultural Stories That Dismiss Pleasure

Generational and cultural narratives often frame bodily joy as frivolous—or something to outgrow.
Alan Watts captured this beautifully when he said we treat life like a serious journey toward a final destination, when in reality, “It was a musical thing and you were supposed to dance while the music was being played.”

Finding the Way Back

For Carolyn, movement eventually became both a doorway into healing and a sign that healing was happening.
As she gently worked her way out of the numbness that grief had caused, dance reappeared in unexpected places:
  • on wedding dance floors
  • at sunrise at Burning Man
  • in her living room with her toddler
  • and in that Bowery church on Friday mornings
Looking back, she sees these moments as some of the most meaningful of the past year.
She’s also clear that healing doesn’t come quickly or neatly. Trauma, loss, illness, and stress don’t vanish because we decide to move. But what movement does offer is a way to come home to ourselves—one step, sway, or breath at a time.
As Roth famously said, “If you just set people in motion, they’ll heal themselves.”

A Final Reminder

Contemplating death isn’t just a philosophical exercise. It's an invitation to live more deeply in the time we have.
And perhaps the simplest, most powerful way to accept that invitation is to return to the body—while we still can—through movement, joy, and dance. 

Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

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"Time", and "The Winds of Eternity".

 Our lives are like grains of sand that lie upon the shores of the oceans of eternity. Like castles in the sand, we are here but for a moment, and then we are no more: swept away by the tides of time and scattered to the winds of eternity.
                                                     Time

The old year is past, a new one has just begun, and we are all now one year closer to eternity. For many people this past year, time was no more. One moment they were in time, the next moment they were in eternity. Time is a two-sided coin, one side despised and wasted during life, the other priceless, and unattainable at the hour of death.

God has given us these days to work out our salvation, but how well do we use them? How often have we observed a man in idle pursuit? If we were to ask him what he is doing, he would reply: "Oh, I am just passing the time."
There was an old song of many years past. It was called "Standing on the Corner Watching All the Girls Go By." Are we just standing on the corners of life watching the days of our salvation going by unused?

To quote Saint Alphonsus De Liguroi:

O time despised during life, you will be ardently desired by worldlings at the hour of death. The thought that they must very soon appear before Almighty God, to give an account of their lives, fills them with untold confusion and anguish. They will ask for another year, another month, or another day to settle the accounts of their conscience, but they will ask in vain. To obtain a single hour they would give all their wealth and worldly possessions, but that hour shall not be given.

Let us therefore exert ourselves to the utmost to accomplish the work of our salvation while there is still time. Do now, what, on the Day of Judgment, you would then wish you would have done. For at the moment of death, the time of grace will have passed, the time of justice will have come.

(Hebrews 9: 27; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 14:10, 12; Matthew 7:13-14; 25:31-47).

Best wishes to all for a happy new year.

Marc D Malamud

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The Quiet Gift of Sitting With Someone at the End of Life

 
Holding vigil for someone nearing the end of life is a sacred space—one that strips away everything we spend our lives chasing. In those final hours, the house, the job, the car… none of it matters. There are no first‑class tickets for this part of the journey. What remains is simple: how we showed up for one another, and what we leave behind.
 
The modern movement to ensure that no one dies alone began in 2001, when nurse Sandra Clarke started NODA (No One Dies Alone) in Eugene, Oregon. Twenty‑three years later, I’m honored to be one of the volunteers carrying that mission forward in our own community.
 
My first vigil came on a cold January afternoon. I arrived at the hospital to relieve another volunteer and found a woman resting peacefully in her final hours, with no family or friends able to be at her bedside. 
 
As I held her frail, soft hand—memorizing every crease and fold—I found myself in a space I’d never experienced before: pure, complete non‑judgment. I knew nothing about her beyond her first name. No story to compare, no history to evaluate, no opinions to form. Just two human beings sharing a quiet moment at the edge of life.
 
Curiosity replaced judgment. Had those hands planted gardens? Rocked babies? Wiped away tears? Created something beautiful? I’ll never know, but the wondering itself felt like a kind of reverence.
 
Yesterday we were strangers; today I walked beside her in the last hours of her life. I spoke her name softly, reassured her she was safe, and sat with her in a silence that felt gentle, not empty. Every so often, I caught the flicker of a smile—maybe a memory, maybe a presence she loved, maybe just peace.
 
When her breath finally slowed and stilled, the room remained quiet and calm. I pulled her blanket up one last time, thanked her for letting me be with her, and slipped out into the hallway.
 
Driving home, I thought about Sandra Clarke—about her simple idea to make sure no one dies alone, and how many lives have been touched because she acted on it. People often tell us that NODA volunteers give an incredible gift by sitting with someone who would otherwise die alone. And yes, offering companionship in those moments is a profound kindness.
 
But after my own first vigil, I realized something else:
the gift goes both ways.
 
Walking someone to the threshold of life—even someone you’ve never met—changes you. It softens you, enlarges you, and reminds you what really matters.
 
And maybe that’s the quiet legacy of NODA: not only ensuring no one dies alone, but reminding the rest of us how to live more fully, more gently, and more connected to one another.

 

Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

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A Period of Extremes

By  January 11, 2026

(Wally earned his master’s degree from Purdue University and was a management consultant and operations manager at multinational corporations. While he has lived in both the US and Israel, he currently lives in Denver. Wally was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and has been interviewed on Israeli television several times about his journey with early-stage dementia. He is active in several organizations that focus on this condition and has agreed to share his journey in this blog. This installation is his first, but he also chronicles his experience in his blog TheLivingDyingDuet.com.)

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Wally Klatch e1767976777827Knowing~Life Haiku
a haiku: knowing life through death
we can only know
our purpose in this life and
live life in a waythat is true to our
purpose when we fully face
our own death coming

Being 70 years old is for old people. Being diagnosed with early-stage dementia is for brain-falling-apart people. Needing help in living my life is for un-functioning people.

None of these had anything to do with me. None of them had anything to do with me until that day in October 2022 when the neurologist looked at the test results and told me that I have early-stage dementia. I thought that’s the worst news I would get, and it was, until January 2024 when the neurologist told me I also have Parkinson’s disease (PD).

PD has a bigger effect on my day-to-day life. I had figured out how to deal with forgetting so much because of the dementia, but with the PD, I physically couldn’t function as I had. I lost the practical use of my left hand in many ways — manual effort became a fingers-of-the-right-hand activity, and I didn’t dare pick things up since they would drop because of the shaking. Large physical limitations were added to the mental limitations, and the future looked very bleak from there.

What happened next couldn’t have happened without having first gone through these things. What happened was at first tiny and was completely overwhelmed by the terrible limitations that had come into my life, and it was just a feeling. It was a tiny feeling that oh-so-slowly started to take place in my life. And that’s exactly what it was — feeling.

As the brain-driven life I had lived up to then was reduced — as I went through mild cognitive impairment (MCI), to use the common phrase — there was room opened for something else besides the cognitive. That “something else” was feeling, and in a way I had never experienced before. The more I paid attention to it, the more it was there, and the more I felt happy that it was there.

I looked around and couldn’t find this described anywhere, so I made up a name for it, mild emotional enhancement (MEE), and created a web page describing it particularly as related to MCI. [That site is mciandmee.com.] And the flow continued. I kept hearing about mindfulness, and I felt something was missing there, too, so I created feelingfulness.com to go with it.

Let’s put words like these in our language and start feeling them and using them, and who knows where it will lead! I know where dementia leads, and as I’m on my way there, I want this approach to be available to me, so I invented I-Have-Now.com, which says that my life and my death are part of each other as the dementia advances. And for me expressing it, even on a T-shirt (see photo above), is part of feeling it.

I feel that a word that expresses what I’m going through is “release,” and that it’s important to me to explore this more. Actually, now that I realize that I’m on my way to the final exit, I feel that there is very much to explore here — I’ve been on the way since the moment I was born and didn’t realize it at all. We’re all here, and the world feels completely different when we realize that fact.

Let’s explore it together — I’ll tell you what I feel along the way on my journey, and I welcome your feelings as you are on yours.

 

Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

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The New Year's Resolution No One Talks About (But Should)

 
If you’re anything like us, you might already be missing that deliciously strange liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s—the black hole where time melts, to‑dos disappear, and no one knows what day it is. If you unplugged, we hope it gave you a breather, because that little pocket of magic won’t return for another year.
Now we’re all back in the grind. Your feed is probably overflowing with resolutions, anti-resolutions, productivity hacks, and “don’t you dare pressure me” January rants. So here’s something completely different to add to the mix:
You are going to die.
Yes. That’s the whole message. And also: that’s the most powerful way to start your year.
Contemplating your own death is the resolution to end all resolutions. It cuts through the noise, clarifies what truly matters, and jolts you back into the present moment—the only place where your actual life is happening. When you remember that time is limited (and that you have no idea how much of it is left), everything gets sharper, simpler, more honest.
Humans have been doing this for over 100,000 years—Buddhists, Stoics, ancient Egyptians, medieval Christians, Indigenous traditions. We’re the ones who forgot how. And somewhere in that forgetting, we also stopped fully living.
So here’s our challenge for 2026:
Make death contemplation part of your daily self‑care. Think of it as existential strength training. Start small. A few minutes. Here’s one easy Buddhist-inspired practice to try.
Once you start, your goals and intentions for the year reshuffle themselves. What matters rises. What doesn’t… evaporates.
Last year, this practice led Carolyn toward more travel, spontaneous adventures, the Hoffman Process, and devouring stacks of books. Maura wrote letters to wedding guests, hosted death dinners, dove deeper into MAID work, and embraced aging with humor. This year she’s committing to Spirit Rock’s A Year to Live program.
If you need convincing, here are a few of the science-backed benefits of thinking about death:
  • Cuts through your bullshit. Excuses fall apart. What matters gets air.
  • Clarifies your values. Priorities click into place.
  • Boosts motivation. “Someday” becomes “now.”
  • Deepens purpose. Meaning stops being something you chase and becomes something you make.
  • Pulls you into the present. Life feels more vivid, right here.
  • Amplifies gratitude. Even ordinary moments start to shimmer.
  • Strengthens relationships. You forgive faster and love harder.
  • Builds empathy. We’re all temporary; compassion gets easier.
  • Ignites creativity. Mortality is powerful creative fuel.
  • Keeps your ego in check. Humility = freedom.
  • Encourages healthy risk-taking. Fear loses its grip; life opens.
The truth is simple:
The only thing scarier than dying is never having really lived.
Here’s to a year shaped by what matters most.

 

 

Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

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  1. Blog ~ Reprint Passing of a Pioneer and Warrior
  2. Blog ~ Navigating Grief Winter 2026
  3. Blog ~ Navigating Grief Winter 2026 2
  4. Blog ~ Doula-Inspired Reflection on My Final Chapter

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Obituaries & Memorials

At Transitioning Doula, we believe that love continues long after a last breath.
This space is devoted to tender remembrance—a place to share stories, blessings, and the everyday moments that made each life uniquely precious. Through these tributes, we honor each beloved soul’s transition, hold their spirit close, and gently accompany the hearts who continue on without them.

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