The Gift of Bones

The Heartbeat Beneath the Grave

Before I was the dancing skeleton, I was the little girl standing on a grave, waiting to feel its heartbeat.

My mother gave me the gift of bones. Not with a ceremony or a speech, but with an invitation. She invited me to love the forgotten, the strange, the shadowed. And I did.

She taught me that bones weren’t scary, they were sacred. That the past still whispered. That even death had a rhythm.

I didn’t know then that I would spend my whole life listening for it.

A Childhood of Cemeteries, Ghost Towns, and Strange Beauty

My mother loved adventure. 

In summer, we went to the beach almost every weekend. She’d pack us up and head for the waves, and I still remember the feeling of sun-warmed towels and sand between my toes. We went to drive-in movies, too: popcorn in the backseat, the glow of the screen lighting up our faces. She loved to go, anywhere, really, as long as there was something to explore.

But her sense of adventure didn’t stop at sun and cinema. She also loved the forgotten, the eerie, the strange.

One of my earliest memories of this was a visit to Rose Hills Cemetery, where they were hosting a rose competition. I didn’t want to go. The idea of being in a cemetery felt wrong, like I was intruding on something somber and off-limits. It creeped me out.

But my mom, in her quiet, insistent way, helped me see it differently. She pointed to the roses, their wild beauty, the way they bloomed unapologetically above the bones. She told me it was okay to be there. That the cemetery wasn’t just a place of death — it was a place of memory, of love, of living beauty.

And she was right. It was beautiful. And I did see it.

That was the moment I began to understand that the strange and the sacred often live in the same place.

After that, cemeteries became something else, not scary, but meaningful. We started tombstone hunting, reading names aloud, walking through weathered rows of stone as though we were visiting old friends.

And then there were the ghost towns, not just the staged ones like Knott’s Berry Farm, which we visited too, but the real ones out in the desert. Jails rusting in silence. Boards nailed across buildings. Dust stirring like memory. Places where time had exhaled and left only bones behind.

To me, it all felt normal.

| Don’t all mothers take their kids to see tombstones and ghost towns?

Only now do I realize how unusual it was, and how deeply it shaped me.

She taught me to love the shadows, not just the light. To find meaning in the abandoned, the cracked, the buried. To walk through forgotten places and listen for what still whispers.

Years later, I found myself doing the same with my own son, wandering Seattle’s Underground City, ghost tours in Old Town San Diego, watching his eyes light up in the dark the same way mine once had.

She passed the gift of bones to me. And I passed it on to him.

The First Skull I Gave

He was about nine or ten years old, old enough to have opinions, young enough to still be soft. It was one of his early summer visits after my remarriage. I had moved to Idaho, and he had come up from California to stay with me for the summer. There was joy in the visit, but it was threaded with ache, the kind of ache that comes from separation, from missing bedtime routines and ordinary breakfasts. We were learning how to be together again in a new way.

One day we went to the beach, and afterward, we wandered into a nearby tourist shop, the kind with pirate flags, mermaids, seashells, and coin-operated distractions. And that’s where he saw it.

A pirate skull bank, wearing a captain’s hat and crystal eyes that glowed red...fierce, strange, a little spooky. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t subtle. And he loved it.

He held it in both hands and looked up at me with that quiet kind of wanting, not a tantrum, not a plea, just a gaze that said: “I like this. This is mine.”

And even though I didn’t fully understand the draw, even though we’d just reconnected and were walking carefully around each other’s hearts, I said yes.

I bought him the skull.

He took it home and kept it on his bedside for years. A sentinel. A companion. A strange little symbol of joy.

And now I see it clearly:

That was the first time I gave the bones. Not metaphorically. Physically. Intentionally.

Not to frighten. Not to be edgy. But to say: “You can love the strange. You can keep it close. It’s yours.”

Maybe that’s where it all began, or maybe that was just the first time I noticed the pattern.

Either way, I gave him the bones. And I think a part of me knew, even then, that I was giving him more than just a bank.

The Dark Sugar Shack and the Dancing Skeleton

Years later, in Second Life, I built a place I called The Dark Sugar Shack.

It was nestled in a dark 1930s bayou, complete with a pie shop front, a rickety back deck strung with lights, meat sizzling on the grill, and a skeleton bartender ready to serve pirate cocktails to anyone who wandered by. Tables circled the edges of the dance floor, and music played from an old gramophone near the corner, where, of course, a skeleton danced.

And not just any skeleton. She was me.

Not officially, of course. But I always knew. That dancing skeleton, light-hearted, rhythmic, full of strange joy, she was an avatar of my soul. She waved and twirled and invited people in, like she was saying:

“See? Even the bones can dance. If I can dance, so can you.”

I used to host impromptu gatherings there: "Come by for coffee and music," I'd say, and before I knew it, three, five, seven people would show up to dance and laugh and linger in the joy of that strange little place. It was never about perfection. It was about permission.

A safe space. A celebration in the shadow. A sanctuary for anyone who wanted to move, to express, to belong.

Looking back, I realize I didn’t build the Sugar Shack to entertain. I built it to remember.

It was my soul reaching back to the pirate skull on my son's bed. Back to the tombstones with my mother. Back to the real ghost towns in the desert.

It was my way of saying:

"Joy lives here too--even in the bones. Especially in the bones."

And when people came, they didn’t just visit a virtual bar. They entered a portal. A bone temple disguised as a party.

The Present Realization — I Am the Keeper Now

It’s only recently that I’ve begun to understand the depth of it all. My intrigue with a tuning fork on the sacrum ad. The conversation at the dealership with a man whose bones, like mine, were changed by radiation. The memory of my fractured sacrum, still holding steady after the fall. The plans to bury my brother’s ashes, his bones, atop my father’s grave, and mark them with stone.

The bones keep rising.

Everywhere I turn, they’re calling. Not as ghosts, but as guides. Not as a warning, but as an invitation to remember what’s been holding me all along.

And I see it now, through all the memories, the skeleton art, the tombstones, the dancing avatars, the gifts to my son. that I am not just someone who loves the bones.

I am the keeper of them.

Not a keeper in the sense of owning, or protecting, but witnessing. Honoring. Listening.

The bones have always carried the structure, of the body, of the lineage, of the soul. And now, I can feel them resonating again. Not just in me, but through me. They want to dance, to heal, to return to their place in the sacred pattern.

This is the gift my mother gave me. The one I passed on to my son. And the one I now carry forward, with every ceremony, every word, every gentle restoration of what was once considered strange, or broken, or too far gone.

The bones are not too far gone. They’ve just been waiting.

And I am ready now. To listen. To remember. To call the bones back together. And to dance.

Maybe that’s what the gift of bones really is, the ability to hold both light and shadow in the same palm. To see the skull and still notice the rose. To love someone not just for their sparkle, but for the soil that grew it.