The Power of a Death Date

On angels, pregnancy, chance, and transition.

Her due date had come and passed long ago.

The little human spirit inside of her angelic womb just did not seem like it was EVER going to die and enter back into the spirit realms.

There had been that time 10 months ago when she thought for sure she was going into labor. Her human had flatlined in the place called the ER, and she had thought it was a sure thing.

But she was wrong.

Miraculously, the other humans had managed to stop the death process and put her human into a limbo period. Her labor had stalled, then stopped.

She didn’t fully understand what had happened, but somehow her spirit’s heart had not stopped beating for long enough to fully activate the transition from life to death.

So now she was just waiting.

She was trying to be patient.

She didn’t understand what was taking so long. How could this spirit want to stay in a body that could no longer move and was barely functioning?

He was being breathed by machines and his heart was being sparked by a little computer they had implanted inside of him.

She guessed it must be because he felt that his mind was still clear. This human must be incredibly patient to endure this long transition period into death.

She didn’t sense a great deal of fear inside of this one. He was just waiting for the next step of transition to come to him. He wasn’t actively moving towards it himself.

She marveled at how the human souls were all so different.

All humans died in the end. It was inevitable.

She was just trying to keep herself comfortable through the long months of gestation. It wasn’t easy, but she knew this was just the way of things sometimes.

This baby had been in her belly since the moment when he had been born to a human family on earth. She had watched over him his whole life, occasionally leading him with the lightest touches of guidance. She felt a great deal of fondness for this baby inside of her and was ready to greet him directly for the first time.

Now that he was nearing the end of his time as a person, her belly was swollen and distended with his essence as he prepared to emerge into the spirit realms once again.

Another of her angel friends had recently given birth to a dying man who had passed through the door of death as a result of an unexpected stroke. He had been on vacation in the earth realm called Mexico when the stroke had claimed him in the middle of the night.

He had only been 53 human years old and her angel friend had been so shocked. She hadn’t been expecting the birth for another 20 years and suddenly, there he was.

His earth humans had mourned the passing with shock, but that was just how it happened sometimes.

All of a sudden like that.

She sighed.

She was just the vessel of transition. There was no rushing it.

This human inside of her seemed like he was going to wait until his body finished dissolving before he’d be willing to let go and pass through the door of death.

Unlike a human baby, the human spirit in her womb would suffer no lasting damage from spending too much time inside the womb of death.

The people surrounding him on earth were another matter though. These humans could find themselves greatly affected by a spirit who resisted its transition into the next phase of being.

Sometimes a dying human would inadvertently drag their loved ones along with them when they died. Their caregivers were often put on an accelerated track towards death by overextending their human bodies in the attempt to keep their loved ones close to them in the human realms.

Then they’d both pass through, sometimes within months or even weeks of each other.

No one knew how it was going to happen until the time of death had passed.

The angel marveled at the tendency of some humans to far outlast their due dates for death, while others barreled towards their own transitions with a speed and reckless abandon that suggested they just could not wait to re-enter the spirit realms.

It was if these fast-moving spirits simply could not wait to rejoin the cloud of lights that waited for all of them.

Some of them wanted to rejoin the loved ones who had passed before them.

Some of them couldn’t stand the pain of being human.

Some of them just had something about their human bodies that just meant they’d have a short, sweet stay on the earth.

Some spirits had a mere day or two of life on earth before they were ready to come back to the place of their origin.

Some spirits never made it into their physical bodies at all. Their time was limited to the time they spent in the wombs of their human mothers.

The timing of things all depended on the experience each spirit requested before dropping out of the cloud of lights to join the queue of beings waiting to be human again.

She took a deep breath and settled back again to wait patiently.

There was nothing to be done but just see what would happen.

She knew he would die in the end.

She knew the soul would make it safely back to the spirit realms and she could get back in the queue to be born on the earth herself again. They always did. It didn’t matter what the human believed during their time on earth. All spirits came from and returned to the same space eventually.

For now, she would wait.

This piece is dedicated to my Uncle Steve, and his caregiver my Mom, and to all the souls that have passed in transition this year and in the years past. Special shout out to the babies who have made the journey from there and back again so quickly. Your families love you more than you will ever know.

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Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.