My Dance with Death, a foreword

It started as a comment on Melissa's blog, then expanded to it's own blogpost... as it lives in the draft file, this here tale grows and grows and grows. As I can only write it in chunks: chunks of emotion, of vocabulary, of memories, of time, so too will it be easier to read in chunks.
You are heretofore invited to participate in my first ever serial, err, serial something that just might turn into a real novel/memoir/book/ABC afterschool special/somethin, someday, though not today...

and so it begins:

Death, in my family's tradition, is the root of all hypocrisy; uh, not fair, mayhap Death merely casts away the shadows that hide our family's tradition of hypocrisy. At least, my first glimpse of hypocrisy came with my first taste of death. And death comes with an expensive lesson; every time. As Life partners with Death, so do I; in a Dance of Balance and Understanding.
I learned those first steps early in my life... perhaps from the very beginning, as I understand my mother's labor was sparked by the death of her grandparent. Born of Death, Bourne of Death, me.