What if today is the day you are going to die?

A warning from beyond the veil

I experienced my first earthquake this morning.

It was small, but I felt its terrible power.

There I was, dreaming, about my father and I traveling, a pleasant dream. And suddenly, a hastening, my bed wobbling, a sudden awakening to a world I could not understand.

Around me the room swayed, as if on a ship at sea, punishing waves lapping us back and fourth in a great storm, only I was home in Condesa.

How could this be?

I reached my hands to grasp for something that was not there.

I couldn’t tell if I was still dreaming because the world around me moved in a way that made no sense.

It is strange and unnerving when the ground beneath you decides to move.

How quickly the earth’s slight movements put everything into perspective.

How very small we humans suddenly become, when matched to the might of mother nature herself.

Ayanda and I are still quite ill today, isolating and taking meds to quicken our recovery. We’ve only been ill a few days but it feels like we’ve been this way for ages. Sickness will do that to you, steal your sense of time.

This afternoon, I told a man on the phone that I feel like death has chosen me this week, decided to take me under its wing, make me see what can and will happen, if I’m not careful.

I told him that I must somehow be more grateful, more present, and more full of this marvelous life.

I feel a warning from beyond the veil. My grandmother perhaps, shaking us awake. She wants me to tell you all that we must open our eyes.

I reached out to an old platonic love, my best friend for many years who I’d lost touch with, I told her how much I missed her and sent her photos and asked about everything I could think of in her life.

Today will not be the day I die, but if it was, I needed her to know that I loved her, that I never stopped. How strange we wait for these moments to express such things. Imagine all the time we’ve wasted waiting for another person to make the first move.

The experience recalled in me a passage from The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer, which is as follows:

“It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. No person or situation could ever teach you as much as death has to teach you. While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you. While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second. While people can teach you that men and women of all races are equal and that there is no difference between the rich and the poor, death instantly makes us all the same.

The question is, are you going to wait until that last moment to let death be your teacher? The mere possibility of death has the power to teach us at any moment. A wise person realizes that at any moment they may breathe out, and the breath may not come back in. It could happen any time, in any place, and your last breath is gone. You have to learn from this. A wise being completely and totally embraces the reality, the inevitability, and the unpredictability of death.”

Life, my dear ones, is so very and fragile — more than any of us could possibly understand.

It will not be until some wicked Tuesday when death comes again for someone we love, a spouse, a child, a parent, that we will begin to feel the weight of its power.

Even then we cannot know the severity, even through grief, even through trauma, the body is designed to forget, to rid itself of as much memory as possible save we go mad.

But sometimes death finds other ways, it rumbles the very ground beneath our feet, a solemn reminder that it someday will come for us too.

Will we be ready? I hope so.

I’m still young, I’ve loved and I’ve lost, and I’ve felt the depths of despair as deeply as I now could know them, but I do not think it wise to assume I could ever understand the extent of what is to come.

The unthinkable grief I will feel when my parents pass, or if I outlive my friends, my spouse, my future children — people I have not even yet known and loved, people who will teach me that I did not even yet know or comprehend how deeply a person can love and be loved.

All of this is to say, please, from one soul to another, tell the ones you love how much they mean to you, in detail, again and again, daily if you can.

Do the things that scare you, stop wasting time living someone else’s life, this whole trip we’re on, it’s madness & chaos and beauty and it’s so so short, much more than we can realize.

Everything can be gone in a second, revel in the precious time you have.

When you drink your coffee and eat your food, say a prayer of thanks to your body, when you see you partner or your child or your neighbor, hug them, tell them all the things you find precious about them.

After all, we can’t stop the inevitability of death, but we can leave this plane knowing we did everything we could, everything our souls called us to do.

If you feel comfortable, tell me below your thoughts and experiences with death below in the comments, perhaps your experiences with grief, with loss, with illness, with almost losing your own life or maybe the life of someone you love dearly.

Once in a graduate poetry seminar called Sex & Death, we opened the course by speaking out loud the deaths in our lives that meant the very most to us.

I shared about how my grandmother altered my relationship with the world. How it blurred the world around me to say goodbye to her for the final time.

For a while as I spoke she was alive again in that room, and there was healing in it.

I invite you all to share that same space in the comments. Let’s be open with one another & hold one another, life & death are tricky and terrible and beautiful and awful, and full of so so much emotion, let’s face it together, if we can.

Sending love to you all,

Alex