Our relationship with Death

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was deep in my psychic medium mentorship with a world renowned psychic and after extensively reading people I didn’t know that she knew very well for 30 mins, I mention something about illness and she says “We never talk about the three D’s - death, disease and divorce”. 

She said that this was far too much of a gray area as so much of our destiny is not yet determined and is shaped and changed every day by the daily actions we take, but she also said this for the reason that people will go insane with control and obsession thinking about anything you say in reference to these three things.

These are some of the biggest areas people fear… When will I die and how? Will I be sick at some point in my life? Will my loved ones be sick? Will I be with this person forever or is there someone else out there for me?

When I used to do readings, these questions were far more common than you’d think and I always stuck to her golden rule of we don’t talk about the three D’s. 

But here I am talking about one of them: Death. 

Our relationship with Death is broken and chaotic. (Literal dying and spiritual / metaphorical dying.) 

From a very young age I have found death to be a fascinating subject. There is so much that people fear around this, and understandably so - it’s mostly mysterious, unknown, sad and heavy.

But I have the firm belief that death can be and is beautiful and I just recently experienced exactly this with my grandmothers passing (Aug 18) and my bunny Buddha passing (Oct 5 - I wrote about both their passings here in my Substack).

Seeing it as beautiful does not mean I disrespect it, quite the contrary. I respect death immensely. I choose to trust death as much as I trust life, as death is a part of life as much as birth is. From the moment we are born we are heading on a direct trajectory into the arms of death. When it will happen? Who really knows… but I trust when it is meant to come to me or to those I love simply because I know it’ll happen exactly when it’s meant to—as all other things do.

It is known in Shamanic belief that the Great Huntress will call to us when our time has come. She stands by with her bow ready to strike when she feels our spirit is ready. It could be today, in a year, in a decade or at the end of a long 100+ year lifetime. And yet we live our life in fear death so much…

I believe our collective relationship to end of life is so broken that we scarcely know what natural death looks like. We do everything in our power to prevent or prolong death without thinking about the true effect that has on us. 

I often wonder if we are keeping ourselves emotionally and mentally “young” or “immature” in how we handle death today. Modern medicine sees death as something that can be avoided or conquered and anyone who refuses medication or treatment in their life is surely mad and needs a psych evaluation — because why wouldn’t they want to live longer? I tend to think that those people have simply chosen the natural route of end of life care. Allow the nature of my reality to engulf me and take me if that is what is meant to be, rather than prolonging the arrow in which the great huntress has pierced me with.

You hear it all the time with people finding out they have mere months to live only to live way past their “expiry” and being upset with their healthcare provider for telling them it would be shorter.

The implications of our healthcare today on our experience and journey with death are definitely to be questioned. 

When I was in massage school there was an outreach program we did at the local hospice. We would go and massage the patients to comfort them, but more often we were taking care of the family members who were riddled with stress having to watch their family die. It was one of the most beloved outreach programs and would fill up in no time.

While there, like many before me, I fell in love with the hospice and grew to enjoy it and look forward to it. It’s quite miraculous to be in a space where people go to die. Having my background in psychic work and mediumship I would often be talking to family members of the patients there and say something (unintentionally) that was intuitive without knowing it was like a pet name their mother had for them or mentioning a food that just happened to be the patient’s favourite and things like that. I remember feeling such intuitive clarity when I was surrounded by the dying.

Being around death regularly grants you a new appreciation for it - if you’re willing to see it that way - it can also make you very sad and gloomy or numb to death. Conscious awareness of our past conditioning is so essential here! How we’ve been introduced to or taught about death is how we face it. I had very little background in this area but I remember asking my dad about it when I was younger and he very nonchalantly said “Death is just a part of life, we all die”. So, I grew up with this same mentality. 

There’s also the matter of losing someone before we feel it’s their time, which of course happens with people of all ages but most commonly we feel this way about those who are young—children, babies, teenagers, even miscarriages. We tend to lean into this idea that there is an unfairness that occurs here and that there was somehow a mistake made by God or life. Again, I believe it happens when it is meant to and that there are no mistakes. That, of course, doesn’t make it any less sad or challenging. I do not share these words free of compassion or understanding for how difficult it is to experience these heavy life moments, truly.

I have worked with likely 50+ women in the past who have come to me with questions about losing babies or needing to energetically heal from an abortion. I’ve seen babies pop up in spirit saying they knew that they wouldn’t fully come into form, or that they knew that their parents weren’t ready for them. Reading the book Spirit Babies by Walter Makichen confirmed all the experiences I’ve had in this way. 

This brings me around to my own experience with birth. Having a baby is so exciting and fruitful and blossoming, but from the moment you get pregnant until the moment that baby comes out of you crying you are also naturally facing the intense depths of death. I believe that women who have the most empowering birth experiences are in a position where they have learned to trust birth as much as they trust death. 

Because there is the potential of death in the sense of losing your baby but there is also a natural death that occurs the moment your baby is born and that is the death of who you were before you gave birth. That woman is now gone and you are reborn. It’s for this reason that physical birthing is the ultimate triple spiral of birth, death and rebirth… and why it is so empowering (any wonder why the medical system also greatly attempts to control every facet of this?!?)

Prior to giving birth to my baby, in order to have the empowering birth I desired I felt strongly that I had to face every potential outcome that could happen, including the ones that most people are often too scared to talk about or even think about.

I journeyed into myself to face this on a physical level with the potential of not having my dream birth and ending up in hospital with a caesarean. I explored what it would be like to have a still birth or a baby who died shortly after birth. All the layers I could possibly imagine with myself and my baby facing death were a part of my birth prep. I ended up having the birth I desired and felt greatly empowered by it and I do feel that this reflection on death helped immensely for me to be in a place of trust with myself and with God, because doing these practices didn't mean I was ok with the death of my child occurring, that would have still been devastating, but instead that I chose to trust the path that God had for me.

All these words above bring me around to my intention with this death series I’m currently writing about this month.

What does natural death look like?
How can we face death more naturally?

I could give you countless examples of how it was in the past for you to reflect on and my idea of what that could look like but I’m a teacher of intuition so I invite you to explore what embracing natural death looks like for you!

Literal and metaphorical. 

I’m currently going through a massive death cycle in my journey... so many changes are happening in my world that I’m finding it hard to keep up with every day. I’m taking the time I intentionally sit in ceremony with my family to address it all and honour it appropriately. Integration is so key to moving forward, especially out of the death phase. Suppression, ignorance or avoidance keeps you in the death phase longer.

What is your relationship with death like? I'd love to know! Comment or share below.