On dying

I’ve been meditating on death lately. My death more specifically. I was afraid of death for a very long time and with good reason. No one wants to die. I surely don’t. It’s the one thing I avoided thinking about, talking about or addressing even when I am faced with it. There have been many people in my life who have transitioned, people that I love(d) deeply. And each time I was faced with death I turned away, scared to look beyond the fear and terror. Death felt final. Family and friends would say that for the people who transitioned, they moved on to a better place. At a young age I couldn’t understand that logic. What could be better than living?

When I was ten years old I decided that I was going to try and meditate on death. I was going to close my eyes, allow the world around me to slip away and see what was beyond this world. What if there is nothing after this life? Will I really experience peace or will I simply fall into endless darkness? I sat in my mother’s papasan chair on the back porch, found a comfortable position and proceeded to die. It took me some time but after a while all the sounds around me faded away, my muscles relaxed and the little bit of light that I could still register through my eyelids was getting darker. I’m not sure how long I was meditating but for a flash I felt completely disconnected from everything and I felt… nothing. All I saw was darkness.

This experiment was jarring. My conclusion was that there really was nothing after life and I would essentially fall into a deep sleep and be gone. This made me terrified. At this point in my life I had already experienced death intimately. My biological mother had passed away three years prior and though I could see her in my dreams and was soon able to see her Spirit walking around in my waking state, I discounted those experiences as merely an attempt to hold on to her. I rationalized that seeing her was simply my brains way of trying to hold on to her through memories. But those memories became less and less clear over time and my dreams were not reenactments of the times we had while she was living, my dreams had us in realms and places that I had never been to, heard of or seen.

Over the years I would see death again and again. We were connected. And each time I pulled further away from it, fearing the lessons that it had for me, thinking that if I allowed myself to explore what death had to show me that I would ultimately die. This also meant that I did not allow myself to fully grieve. Grieving is a holy endeavor. I never knew this before because along with death we (as a western society) are afraid to grieve. When someone we know has lost someone they love and are deep in the folds of pain and sadness we back away. We have no tools, no foundational understanding of how to hold space for someone in these dark times, mostly because these are the moments when we are confronted with our own mortality.

Rather than learn how to be with someone in their grief or even be with ourselves in our own, we push it down, tuck it away, hide it from the light. If there is anything that I have learned in all my years it’s that grief needs air. Just like anything alive that gets mold and withers when it’s suffocated and not given light, grief needs space and air to be and breathe. But I hid my grief and locked it away each time I shared my pain and someone apologized for my loss and then quickly changed the subject. And I get it. Pain is tough to witness, especially when the pain you are witnessing is from someone you love and care about. Seeing their pain reminds us of our own pain and we avoid recognizing that at all costs.

Two years ago I could no longer hold my grief. The bubble burst when I was experiencing major shifts in my marriage. I could feel that my relationship was changing, morphing into something unknown. I didn’t know what was on the other side of this change and I began to grieve my relationship. Though I didn’t think that I would actually die, confronting the immense change felt like a death inside of me. My chest always felt tight, my breathing restricted. I could feel “something” slipping away and tried desperately to hold on to the last tiny piece of familiarity and comfort that I could.

But when the tides of change kept coming I let go. That created space for all of the pain that I had held onto for so many years to come flooding to the surface. I cried for days and weeks on end, many times without anything prompting my tears. I would fall asleep crying, wake up crying. I would cry as I went grocery shopping which was always a no-no for me. Crying in public was a practice that I never embraced. I rarely cried in front of people that I knew. But here I was running errands with salty tears streaming down my face with swollen eyes and a stuffy nose.

It was in this grieving that I thought about revisiting that practice of meditating on death. What would my findings be now that time and more knowledge had entered my body? Would I still think of death as an absolute end? Would I find something greater? My meditations shifted and I began to pull myself apart one piece at a time. Stripping away my name, my roles, my likes, my dislikes, my identities, ME. And in one very deep meditation I was met with darkness again but this time I could still feel ME. Who was this me? I knew it wasn’t the person that I identified as. All I could feel was an expansive and limitless “I” that had nothing to do with the physical body that I inhabit.

I practiced this meditation multiple times, in fact I still practice it today. I detach myself from myself to remember the true essence of who and what I am. What I’ve come to find is that what I had been afraid of was the death of what I am connected to. I was afraid of losing my family of origin, my chosen family, this life, my things. But once all of that is gone I found that I (the I that is greater) still remains. This practice has helped me have more compassion for others. I am able to see the connections in everything much clearer than I was before. I enjoy life, even the simplest of actions brings joy and gratitude. While I am not embracing death or calling it forth, I am at peace with the moment that my time will come.