In the book, I wrote about fantasizing my own death when I was seven, after my mom died in her sleep from heart failure. In my waking dream, my heart, like hers, would stop. After Aunt Barb crashed her car and died when I was eighteen, the fantasy turned to dying by bleeding. Breaking through glass and tearing skin to blood.
I don’t know, but I’m guessing this is sorta normal, a part of the grief process, a way to feel connected to a dead love.
I have a newish death fantasy, one that I dream since Dave died. Like after my mom died and I imagined a death that mirrored hers and I felt my heart stop, after Dave died I started to lose my breath and imagined myself dying as Dave did by running out of air.
The first time I noticed it happening and identified it as a new death fantasy was a couple summers ago. I lay on a rock next to a steam, soaking in sun and humid air, feeling peaceful and grounded when my breath became shallow and I didn’t feel like I was getting enough air. All I could see was Dave taking his last breaths, all I could feel was his slipping away.
For the first time, on the rock in the sun, I saw that memory as traumatic. In the first few years after Dave died, I thought of the moment of his last breaths, and the months leading up to it, as magical. I saw golden light that luminated truth.
But on the rock, in that sun soaked moment, I saw the past as traumatic. As I basked in earthy pleasure, I was vividly aware of the pain and suffering that had so far been drowned out by cosmic light. In the light of the Earth sun, I saw a new human truth, felt a new human pain.
So now, my death fantasy is: I can’t breathe. I can’t catch my breath. My breath gets shallower and shallower, so if it was any shallower, I will die.
I guess it’s something like a panic attack. Only I’m not panicking. I’m usually completely chill. I just can’t breathe. And I think, ah, so this is how it feels. To slip away.
Breathing, like meditation, is best when you do it consciously, but if you don’t it still happens. All practices are correct; all doors lead to *heaven*. The enlightenment switch can flip anytime. Even Catholics agree: you only need to ask the Lord’s forgiveness to receive it. Whammy. Just like that.
Yesterday, in the shower, with the sunlight blasting in through the translucent window glass, I felt my breath weaken. Knowing it would pass, and celebrating the sensation because it has become sort of a momentary tribute to Dave, I observed my breath, my shallow barely functional breath. I fantasized it stopping all together and then saw my body break apart and dissolve. I thought of one of my favorite analogies of the body as a vase that when it breaks the inside-the-vase air becomes one with the outside-the-vase air.
I thought about how breath work and meditation help dissolve the illusion of the body vase, but how—no matter how conscious your breathing or deep your meditation—the vase still breaks and the airs become one. I remembered spontaneous healing and spontaneous enlightenment are real. All the prayers and good behavior may make for a certain quality life, but all qualities of life are valid and valuable.
There’s millions of possible outcomes, none right or wrong. In one, I’m wrecked . In one, I’m a wise old sage, knowing the light of faith and love. In all of these possibilities, we all die.