Learning To Die — Crossing the Threshold into life.
You are taught many things growing up, not how to die. It is a very important skill that is missing in modern culture education.
As a teenager two of my friends chose to kill themselves literally and they did. They succeeded in taking their own lives.
Adolescence is a time of great transition. Transition means to change from one form to another in doing so, you die to what was.
It is likely adolescence is the first time it becomes necessary to consciously engage with the process of dying.
However, the village does not remember yet the wisdom of how to be with a dying person. Especially a young, dying person.
The moment a young person considers killing themselves is the moment they are ready for authentic initiation into adulthood.
Because it is not their being that is longing to die, it is their survival strategies. At the exact moment they are ready to die it is time to consciously turn towards all that really wants to burn.
This wisdom was never fully lost, it is within each person, who has the courage to listen.
I recently found myself at a point where I did not want to live. A necessity to return my body to the ground and decompose all the way back into the earth. It wasn’t the first time I have had this necessity.
There have been many moments where I thought of death as the only option. Really what I see now is it is not me that wanted to die. Instead it is the way I have been navigating life, my strategies for surviving, instead of helping me to be alive become like a tourniquet about my life force. It is those that are longing to die.
It is in those moments that I am seriously considering death, that I am ready to consciously face into the process of dying, rather than leaving the urge to rot like a festering wound, instead it is a call to turn towards and ask: “what is it that really wants to burn”.
“ I woke in the night a familiar fear running through me, waves of heat breaking a sweat on my skin. An image came to me of the beautiful trees out by the waterfront, how strong and sure their branches are, how dependable gravity is. A familiar thought tightened like a rope about my neck: hanging trees and me hanging there until morning , no one would find me, I could peacefully be there until the rubbish truck came to collect me, gently swaying with the night air, my last night on earth… My heart beat with a sudden shock… DONT! I drifted off to sleep and woke up this morning, warm in my own bed. Another day”.
This time that death came knocking on my door, it was coming into winter. I watched the sap draw deeper into the ground, life slowing down, darkness spending more time about the house, leaves once green and fresh on the trees, now crunchy skeletons beneath my feet. And, instead of numbing the pain in my being with fantasies, I altered my attitude, only slightly. This time I decided to be with it.
What if my impulse to die is totally natural, that the numbing, hiding and turning away from it was inorganic and destructive?
I decided to shift, only slightly, my relationship to the part of me that wanted to die. Instead of hiding it and mooching melancholic about the earth. I started talking.
I told people around me what was happening in me and slowly turned into the contractions about my heart, instead of dabbing them away. I burned in the telling, no longer fighting to keep myself in the right shape. What happened was astounding, slowly the wisdom started lapping at my shores… it really was time for me to die. And it was my job to make starkly clear exactly what it was that was dying.
The steps I took were simple and scary. I said goodbye to life, all of it. I sat with trees and said goodbye, I stood in the ocean and handed back my talent for listening, my dreams of horses, my loves and passions for others. I gave my heart back to the stars and said my deepest goodbyes to the people I loved.
I wrote specifically about everything I had failed at, all the paths, expectations and hopes of others that I had failed to fulfill. My own dreams that I had not brought into fruition. I wrote about my failure to conform to a culture set on destroying the planet. My failure to become a palatable good woman, who served men in a patriarchal system.
I wrote my obituary, stunted, shortened and shaky, I wrote it anyway. I planned my funeral and invited a few women to be there. I had a call with a Woman, Aralyn Doiron, who is a death doula who consciously held space for my process and the liminal state I entered afterward.
A lot of grief moved through me.
Then surprisingly, I cracked through, into what might be the greatest taboo of the whole dying process, that of, a gentle peaceful joy. I was going to die, my life was over. I had felt everything I needed to, written all that wanted to be written, said everything as real as I could. My heart was at peace on the morning I had chosen as my funeral. I rose early, in the dark, took my shovel and went out by the beach front, then by candle light and slow oozy morning sun, I dug my grave.
By the time it was done, my body was warm and there were rubbed bits of skin on my hands. I sat for some time with those who were already dead, my ancestors. I called them close to me, asking for their guidance.
Two women, who came to be with me for my funeral, arrived and I buried all the pages that I had written in the sand. Then left one hole open for all that was yet to be.
My body temperature was dropping and I found a deep relaxation and peace in me. There was nothing left to grief, nothing left to prove. The women held a sheet up for me, and I took off my clothes in the chilly morning air. I looked down the beach once as I was doing this and still the hairs rise on my skin from what I saw. There, at the exact place where I had called to my ancestors a strange mist had accumulated, they had come to asher me across the veil. The portal was open, I could now leave.
The women wrapped me in cloth and I lowered myself into the ground. They buried me, placing earth all over my body. The life in me stilled and my heart rate slowed down. A candle burned at my head, although my face was not buried I was totally embraced by the earth. Cold, electric, real earth. The Women read my obituary out loud, as best they could as my handwriting was scrawly and bumpy.
Then there was silence. Heat ebbed away from my body into the earth, a peace lapped at my bones, the earth breathed me, not judging, not rejecting, layer after layer receiving me into herself. ..
Then very slowly, a tingling started to come through me, from my core, I did not force anything I simply let it happen, letting it unfold. In my core something was starting to heat up. Although my hands and feet had gone white, numb deathly cold, something within me was coming to life.
A vitality moved like a snake through my being, as I gave it more space, a deep resounding YES to life moved me. A hunger to walk this earth, right now for no other reason except for the pure ecstasy of living.
I lay in that ground for 30 whole minutes and in my dying, I found my doorway into life.
