The Many Faces of Death
Before she herself died, she had always thought of death mostly as a permanent ending. Harsh. Cold. Finite. Final. A clear and concise moment in time. That’s how it’s most commonly understood. But that’s not how it was for her. Her death was long, gradual, slow, often hazy, blurry, and imprecise. And though some parts of it were admittedly and expectedly agonizing and painful, other parts were barely even felt, not in real-time at least. Some parts were surprisingly beautiful, and others weren’t even endings at all; they were miraculous and magical new beginnings.
Death is full of paradoxes and ironies like that. Life is too. She’s come to learn and really understand that. From Charlie Chaplin to Shakespeare to Jimmy Buffett to Jamie Wheal, she too now knows that life is full of the tragic, the magic, and the comic too; all mysteriously working together. Death and life — they’re both full of those paradoxical dualities, all for us. Good and bad, joy and pain, easy and hard, darkness and light, breakdowns and breakthroughs, stagnation and growth, doing and being, hope and despair, short-term and long-term. She now understands all those dichotomies are there to accentuate and complement each other. They’re there for us to harmonize, to help us really live, and to help us grow through life rather than just go through it.
“When you stop growing you start dying.” She first heard that from Tony Robbins, and it really landed with her. But apparently, it was William S. Burroughs who is credited with having first said it. Either way though, she loved it, and she always believed it to be true. She still does. What she never considered before she experienced her own death though, is that it’s also true that an indispensable part of growing inevitably entails some dying also. So, she learned yet another irony of life, and of death — you don’t grow, you start to die; you do grow, you die a little bit too.
So she now understands that growth can also be a type of death. She understands the many faces death can have; it’s not just one. The physical, actual death of loved ones is the most obvious and common one. But any kind of loss can be death, and growth almost always demands some loss too. Then there’s the loss and death of friendships, partnerships, and all kinds of relationships. There’s the loss and death of dreams, goals, ideals, beliefs, and values. Betrayal is also a type of loss and death. There’s even the loss and death of self, like she had. The loss and death of certain parts of her, parts of her identity and persona, and all the things that were put on her like costumes and props, but were never really hers. When that self died, a great deal of the life she had built upon it had to die as well. Those were all extremely painful losses and deaths she experienced, but they were also an integral part of her growth.
“All growth requires loss. A loss of your old values, your old behaviors, your old loves, your old identity. Therefore, growth sometimes has a component of grief to it.” — Mark Manson
Her father died when she was just one, a week after her first birthday. Three of her four grandparents died before she was even born. Her living grandfather, who she grew up with for a good part of her childhood, died a little more than two and half decades after she was born. And one of her closest childhood friends died without warning not so long ago, and way too early. Those were just the most glaring of her direct experiences with the most obvious type of death — the physical and actual death of the people in our life. There were also, of course, the slightly less direct, but still impactful, experiences she had via many of the people she was close to who themselves lost their own loved ones. But it wasn’t until her death that she really understood death’s multitude of faces.
That face of death — the death of self — is most often insidious and almost unnoticeable. That’s also what makes it so menacing. We don’t see it coming. At some point though, it catches up to us; or maybe we catch up to it. That’s how it was for her. She started noticing that she felt like she was literally dying inside over a pretty long period of time. That feeling gradually grew stronger until she couldn’t ignore it anymore. She no longer recognized herself in the mirror. She didn’t even know or remember who she was. Her days started to feel like an endless scene out of some perverse movie, or nightmare. It was surreal for a while. Now she knows that she felt like she was dying because she was. Well, certain parts of who she had learned to be were dying, but not her true Self; not me.
Almost everything dies in some form or another at some point in space and time. It’s why there’s so much truth in saying that everything is temporary. What she’s come to learn, though, is that it’s also true that the true Self, the one with a capital S, the one that’s beneath all the costumes and props — that Self never dies. It’s hidden sometimes, or lost, it’s often silent for a while, and yes eventually it’s not here in this physical world and in its physical body anymore, but that Self never dies. She truly believes that now. That’s me; I am her. It’s the other self — the mask we wear — that sometimes has to die so that our true Self can live.
“People forget that the word ‘personality’ derives from the word ‘persona’ which means mask; our personalities mask who we truly are.” — Michael Beckwith
The same goes for love, true and real Love — also with a capital L — in all its forms, whether romantic or parental or otherwise. Real Love — true, honest, pure, and unconditional — never dies either. The confusion she used to have between her persona and her true Self was intrinsically intertwined with her misconception about what love really is and what she was subconsciously taught that it was. Because of that, after she awakened to her true Self, after the death of the parts of her self that were never really her, that’s when she started to understand what real Love really is. Like I said, there are beautiful parts to death sometimes.
She now learned that abuse of power is never love. She learned that reckless disregard for boundaries is not love. She learned that squashing another’s individual sovereignty is also not love. She learned that lying or suppressing the truth, denying or invalidating self-expression, and exercising control, ownership, or possession over someone is definitely not love. She learned that knowingly and calculatingly portraying a false persona to the world — no matter how nice, shiny, or believable it may be — is not love.
She learned that cloaking transactional conditions around love, turning a blind eye to inequity or injustice — no matter how big or small, playing both sides of the fence, or refusing to protect, defend, take a stand for, and hold one’s ground against an enemy of someone or something that you love, is not love. Being nice at the sacrifice of true kindness and true goodness is not love. Relinquishing or abandoning what or whom you believe in, is not love. Being clearly in the black while pretending to hide behind shades of grey is not love. Indeed, doing any of these things and then calling it love or justifying it in the name of love is also, most certainly, not love.
She learned that real Love is not death; it’s life, and life is Love. She learned that real Love is light, hope, power, passion, patience, tolerance, humility, and trust. It’s being vulnerable, courageous, strong, and kind. It is resilient, it gives meaning, it brings gratitude, and it deepens understanding all at once. Real Love is truth, it is true, and it is the greatest and highest expression of all of us– it’s her, it’s me, and it’s you. She learned that Love is the answer for all, and it really is the most powerful force of all. It’s what we all want, crave, desire, and need, and it’s what we’re all here to give and receive. She learned that Love is coming back home to yourself and remembering who you are — your truths, your values, your beliefs, your goodness, your gifts, and your strength. She learned to remind herself and tell herself: “Love is your essence. Love is everything, and everything really does start with you.”
Most of all, she learned that she was surrounded by an abundance of Love everywhere- in her, around her, from others, towards others, from herself, and towards herself. So much Love to give, to receive, and to share. So much Love to experience and savor. Love — that was the real essence of her true Self, of me; of the parts of her that were still very much alive, and the part that never dies. It’s the real essence of all of us. And she learned all these things only after, and because of, the death of everything that wasn’t that. Again, life is ironic, and so is death.
“Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.” — Prince Ea
The death of a dream. The death of your beliefs. The death of your faith in people. The death of hope — that’s the worst one. The death of who you thought you were, your identity and persona. The death of the life you built upon that persona. The death of the type of life you always imagined yourself having. Those were all some of the other faces of death she experienced. But, the beautiful part about those types of death is that they’re not necessarily final. With time, she started to realize that. And she began to think that maybe those faces of death weren’t really deaths at all; even if that’s what they felt like. Maybe they were just a transitional space between one type of living, and another — perhaps a better one.
The liminal space between a certain type of death and a certain type of rebirth. That paradoxical stage where we feel we’re no longer there, but not yet here; and in both at the same time. She realized that’s the face of death that’s also the inescapable part of growth. She’s been there. She knows how uncomfortable it is, and how painful it could be. But she also knows that it’s from there that she emerged the most liberated and regenerated, the most free and alive she had ever been. When she was in that liminal space, it was like she was standing on both sides of a portal, but not fully inside either one and in both at the same time. She had already shed most of, if not all, of her old skin, but she hadn’t yet really come into her new one. She was and wasn’t the caterpillar anymore, and she was and wasn’t the butterfly yet.
She felt like she was neither there, nor here; and simultaneously both. It was confusing, disorienting, and scary; and it was also exhilarating and full of possibility. She also somehow intuitively understood that it was necessary. She knew that she had to allow herself to be there in that space, for as long as she needed to be there. Being aware of it, not fighting or denying it, honoring it, and walking through it patiently, honestly, openly, courageously, and vulnerably until she would emerge on the other side anew– she knew that was all she could do.
So she gave herself the space and time she needed to make that walk. To do the work that needed to be done to grieve all her different types and faces of death, including the death that comes with healing. Healing her deepest wounds and traumas — uncovering some which she had buried, discovering others for the first time, and facing all of them to understand, to weep, and to grieve for them, so that they could finally begin to heal and she could finally let them go. She knew that without that reckoning, the healing would never happen and they’d continue to stay stuck inside of her. And now she knows, that healing was necessary for the rebirth and reentry– for her to come alive again and come back home to herself; to me.
And after she came back home, she had a new and deeper knowing of her Self. She understood that sometimes life and people would quit on her, but she now knew she would never again quit on herself. She understood that sometimes life and people would lie to her, betray her, and abandon her; but she now knew she would never again lie to, betray, or abandon herself. Sometimes, life and people would break sacred promises, spoken and unspoken, that they made to her, but she would never again break a sacred promise that she made to herself. She understood and unequivocally knew that, and she also knew that that was the only way to truly honor the death of parts of herself and the life of her true Self.
So in the end, she learned that the real irony of death is life. Because when you experience death close up, whichever face of it you may encounter, that’s when you evaluate your life and ask yourself whether you’ve even been truly living. Living on your terms, living your truth, not living according to others’ expectations, and really living your life. She learned that death is sometimes the one thing that can wake you up to start living again; the one thing that can bring you alive again, I mean really alive, and the one thing that can bring you back home to yourself. She is alive, and she is home. I am her, and she is me.
