Can’t Turn Back: How three encounters with death shaped my life

Part 1: You’re Going to Die

It was February 15th, 2013, and I knew I was going to die. I looked in the mirror and instantly, I knew. For 37 years, I had looked into the mirror and had brushes with this understanding, but once I knew it, all of those instances suddenly turned into mere blips on the radar of mortality. Bursting into tears doesn’t even begin to describe the fitful, crushing, nearly Biblical flood of raw sensation and terror that met me in my reflection in the mirror that day.

Before, I knew it was a fact of life, but what does a fact feel like? A fact remains in the brain. No amount of truths will break the membrane between your conceiving of something and your experiencing of it. I suppose I experienced death itself, by accepting it as a somatic and spiritual fact rather than as a conceptual fact. The process of fact exiting the brain and entering the body, well, it’s like getting smacked in the spirit with a mile high granite wall coming at you at 100 miles per hour, staunch, resolute, and pragmatic.

I knew. I was going to die. I couldn’t turn back. I knew and I couldn’t un-know. I knew it in my skin. I knew it in my eyes. I knew it in my lungs. I knew it in my throat. I couldn’t take my eyes off of my reflection, as if looking deeper into this thing, this skin thing, this other creature, that would indeed, for sure, be non-existent one day. I kept staring her-me-it, down. I kept searching for a different realization, a better realization, but all she-me-it did was stare back at me, soothsaying my end.

I didn’t want to die. I loved life. I was studying performance art in London for my useless but fulfilling master’s degree. I was meeting amazing people, doing amazing things, and feeling amazingly me. I was more in love with life than I had ever been before. Why was this truth-bomb dropping on me today? I looked into my eyes and I didn’t even see me, but another living thing, who/ that/ which was going to end. I saw a living thing, destined to be a dead thing.

And then I remembered something my mom once said to me when I was 30 years old, when I was grappling with the then-concept of death. She recounted a story of when I was first born, how she was holding me and admiring me and suddenly, she started sobbing because she knew right then and there that I, too, who had just entered this world, would also die. To think of a mom holding her newborn baby and accepting that she, too, would die, and then to tell that newborn baby 30 years later, I thought was pretty cool. I’ll never forget my mom being that real with me. And at 37, I now saw it too. At 36, yeah, I knew I’d die some day but it all seemed so abstract like “yeah, yeah, we all die, got it, life is short, death is the only thing we have in common, yada yada.” But what does that really mean? It means you will end. You, whatever “you” is, will end, and never, ever, ever, be again.

A year before, I had lost my 27 year old cousin to cancer, which was one of the reasons I was there in London, to do something I had always wanted to do, before I left this world, too. It was some kind of homage to him, some nod of recognition that I wasn’t going to waste my life out of respect for how short his was. But, as much as we say we make decisions based on the fact that we will someday also die, in our minds, we somehow think that even with all the death around us, death will somehow skip over us. When I looked into the mirror, I got that death is not going to skip over me. Death will be coming for me, too, and I existing, will turn into I not existing. Just like that. It was from this day on, that the reality of death started living in me. I knew I was going to die. And I would know that for the rest of my life.

Part 2: You’re Going to Die Alone

Just like I knew I was going to die, I also knew I was going to die alone. I learned this on an Ayahuasca trip in March of 2016. I went with my husband at the time, who was there to face his own demons, and I was there to support him. What I didn’t bargain for was to be turned completely inside out existentially, and emptied like some discarded, dis-orbited crumb of asteroid on a cold, deafeningly quiet earth.

After the initial ceremony, which consists of a circle of hippies, corporate misfits, wounded soldiers, and some “normal, neutral” types all sharing the same shot glass of the prepared plant elixir and retreating to their respective floor mats, I became overcome with a depth of sadness and aloneness that swept me into a darkness I had never known before. While the facilitator played a wooden flute with the pathetic intention of holding the space, all of those around me started vomiting or “purging” as they say, their pain or attachments while I disappeared into a black, black space.

My chest started to go concave and I felt emaciated, withering, transparent, like the paper-thin wings of a newly born dragonfly. I started to cry. And cry. And cry. My “purging” was tears, howling, invasive, waves and waves of wrenching sobs. I was finally admitting my pain through these tears. I was in pain because of what my husband was going through. I was in pain because of what I was going through because of what he was going through. I was in pain because of what he was going through because of what I was going through.

I was in pain because I was in pain. I was in pain, alone.

I cried because I saw something in that black, black space. I saw that all of us, every single being on this planet, was going to die alone. I saw all of us each upon a floating rock, each upon his own island, living and dying, alone. Just as I knew I was going to die, I now saw that I, and everyone else, was going to die alone. It was crystal clear, this transmission of knowing, that no matter how much we relate or conflict with one another, no matter how much love or confusion or superficial unity or connection there is, behind all of our faces, in all of our hearts, is a person who only we can know, and will only ever know, truly, and so we live and die alone.

In that abyss was a catalogue of every soul, every being, floating, alone, through space, from the inception to the end of their lives. After that epic cry, I knew this, and it was okay. It was okay that we are all alone and will all die alone. It had to be okay because it was true. Just like I couldn’t un-know that I was going to die, I now could not un-know that I was going to die alone.

And so are you.

Part 3: You’re Going to Die Alone and Unhappy (if you don’t do something about it)

I woke up on my 40th birthday on July 6, 2017, and immediately started crying my eyes out. Not because I was turning 40. But because I had reached 40 living a certain way. For the duration of my marriage, which I had ended the previous November, I was living in a way where everything within me was sacrificed, compromised, and deeply unhappy. I had sacrificed my entire life, my entire self, to be there for my husband.

And on this day, my birthday, I woke up and realized what a new life I had the choice to have.

What I realized was that by living in a way where my health and well-being were insignificant in relation to someone else, I was effectively robbing myself of my own life and what was at stake if I continued to live that way, was me.

I was at stake.

If I ever was unhappy with a partner again, by remaining with them, that was the trade off, that was what I was putting at stake, not just a little part of me, or a day of my life, but all of me, and all of my life. I was crying because I had lived in a way where I wasn’t respecting that I was at stake. I cried because I was mourning that I had made that choice in the past. I was mourning the gravity of that choice, the damage of that choice, the seriousness of that choice.

But today was different. At the beginning of my 40th year, I had a second chance. I got to reclaim my life. I got a chance to live like my life was at stake. And so began the emotional overhaul of my life starting at 40. I quit a toxic job. I trashed half of my belongings. I packed up my car, hit the road, and searched for the life I really, truly wanted. After traveling to the ocean, to my home state of Massachusetts, and driving cross country through blizzards in January, I landed in Colorado. It is my new home. The home where I truly live, is within me, where I am at stake, where every choice I make, I make at stake, where I know that I will die, that I will die alone, and that I will die alone and unhappy if I don’t do something about it. So today, and every day, I’m doing something about it.