How does one approach the subject of death?
It's a question that has haunted me since the moment I realized that death was not an idea but an unavoidable fact of life. That understanding arrived early, long before I had the language to grasp its magnitude. What I did understand--instinctively, viscerally--was the enormity of loss. I saw it every day in my mother's eyes, long before I knew the stories behind her grief.
In our home, grief wasn’t a single event — it was a season that never fully ended. My mother endured three devastating losses in as many years. First, her father died in 1967. The following year, she lost her twin sister, a bond so deep that even as a child I sensed the gaping wound it left behind. And then, in 1969, her mother passed away. Three years. Three blows. Three absences that reshaped the woman who raised me. I didn’t understand all of the details then, but I felt the weight of it all. It lived in the quiet moments, in the way she looked out the window, in the softness of her voice when she spoke about “before.” Her grief became the backdrop of my childhood — not in a dramatic or overwhelming way, but as a steady, unspoken presence that taught me what loss looked like long before I had the words for it.
Fast forward to my own encounter with that same specter. In 2016, I came closer to death than I ever imagined I would. What began as a routine surgery to correct a perforated colon spiraled into sepsis — sudden, violent, and life‑threatening. One moment I was recovering; the next, I was slipping into a place where nothing felt certain. My mother was still very much a part of my life then. I had stepped into the role of her caregiver with a kind of gladness — not out of duty, but out of love, and a sincere desire to return to her even a fraction of what she had given me. Those years were some of the most intimate and tender we ever shared. And as I lay in that hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, I knew that my story was still intertwined with hers. I wasn’t ready to leave her. Not yet.
For all the stories people tell about “near‑death experiences,” I had none of that — no tunnel, no light, no sense of floating above my body. What I had was fear. A deep, primal fear of the unknown, the kind that settles into you when you realize you might not make it through the night. And yet, mixed with that fear was something I still struggle to describe. As much as my body was failing, there was a strange quiet inside me, a sense that letting go might be easier than fighting. It wasn’t a wish to die — it was more like a soft, dangerous invitation to stop hurting.
But then something shifted. Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was love, maybe it was the unfinished pieces of my life calling me back. I had survived an early death sentence in my 20s. I had come through so much physically over the course of many years, and I had finally found what felt like true love. I hadn't even been married a full year. I wasn’t ready to leave that behind. I wasn’t ready to leave him behind. And so, even as my body weakened, something in me chose to stay. Chose to fight. Chose to live.
Love is the force that clarifies everything when the body is failing.
As I drifted in and out of consciousness, something unexpected happened. Beneath the fear and the physical pain, there was a strange clarity — a sense that love was the only thing that mattered. Not the kind of love we talk about casually, but the deep, anchoring kind that shapes a life. I realized that love was the reason I wanted to stay. Love for the man who had made my heart his home. Love for my mother, who still needed me and whom I still needed in ways I hadn’t fully understood. Love for the unfinished pieces of my own story. And I’ve wondered since then if love is also what allows some people to leave. Maybe when the circle feels complete, when the heart has given and received what it came here to offer, love becomes the doorway instead of the tether.
My experience didn’t make me fearless. I still worry about physical suffering, and I still feel a tremor of uncertainty when I think about the moment when life lets go. But something in me changed. The mystery around death softened. The terror loosened its grip. And in its place, I found something quieter and more enduring: love. Love is what outlasts physical death. I’ve come to believe that love is also what allows some people to let go — not as an ending, but as a completion. So if you fear death, you’re not alone. Most of us have some fears around this subject. But talking about it doesn’t make it arrive sooner; it simply makes the living richer. When we speak honestly about death, we’re really speaking about what matters most in life — the people we love, the stories we carry, the tenderness we share.
And maybe that’s the quiet hope I can offer: that when death comes close, love becomes unmistakable. It rises to meet us and steadies us. It reminds us that even in our most fragile moments, we are held by something larger than fear.
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