Because I Could Not Stop...
Facing Mortality and the Yearning for Life
This is a hard post to write—and it might be a hard post to read. But I promised myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t hold back from the tough stuff, and for twenty years now, writing has been my main outlet and saving grace.
It’s a bigger audience than in those early blogging years. Part of me feels a little afraid of continuing to be so raw and open online, especially when the online landscape has changed so dramatically since those days of community, and not necessarily for the better. But this space is meant for that. It’s where I express myself—where I can be honest with what’s in my heart and on my mind and process my experiences. It’s my real life, lived in real time. I’d be doing myself an injustice if I silenced myself now. While some things are kept private and sacred out of respect for myself and others, my life—my thoughts, my perspectives, my emotions—are never off-limits.
So, here we go…
I think about death a lot.
I know that sounds so morbid, but it’s the truth. It’s something that’s been part of my awareness since I was young—I’m talking ten-years-old kind of young—and exploring its meaning and our human relationship to it in the earliest pages of my journals, my poetry, my stories.
See? Writing is how I process the complexities of being human—whether in my novels or my poetry or these posts, it’s where I can express myself, unfiltered, and find my way to a deeper understanding of whatever’s weighing heavy on the soul.
When I say I think about death a lot, I don’t mean in a gothic, emo way. I was never gothic… maybe a little emo, but only in that I’ve always been a sensitive soul who feels things so deeply and explores the depths of that emotion in order to understand myself better.
I’ve never been afraid of the depths.
No, when I say I think about death a lot, it’s more in a philosophical, poetic, Emily Dickinson way—“Because I could not stop for Death…” and all that. She personifies death to explore it, to understand it, maybe even to make friends with it. I’ve been curious about death in the same spiritual way I’ve always felt connected to the Universe—as something esoteric and abstract, yet intuitively felt and personally experienced. Something that exists alongside life rather than in opposition to it. Something that I’m part of—that we’re all part of—in its grand design.
Death used to scare me when I was younger. Its loss felt like abandonment, and I couldn’t make sense of the seeming finality of it all. But having experienced so much of it in my life since—through family and friends and pets—and through facing my own mortality with illness and my spiritual journey, I’ve come to understand it better, to see it differently.
Like Emily, you could say I’ve made friends with it.
From the human perspective, Death is scary because it’s the one thing we all face that we can’t control. It’s the very edge of our experience here—what makes everything feel more fragile and fleeting. It’s also what makes it all so precious and why, even when I was that young child, I vowed to myself to make the most of the gift that is this life.
That vow was renewed when I was sick—when my body began to decay and my spirit became shadowed and I felt like a ghost of my former self. Facing death—your own or someone you care about—makes you face life. It makes you go hard for what you love, to fight for what’s meaningful.
We might be spiritual beings having a human experience and infinite in that sense… But we have this one life, and I want to make the most of this and every life.
That’s what my spiritual journey has shown me. When I unlocked my psychic gifts—gifts that I had as a child but suppressed—I saw, without a doubt, how eternal we are. Energy isn’t created or destroyed; it simply changes form. It continues in a way that, unless we’re attuned to it, we might not fully recognize or understand within our human minds. But the soul knows. The soul recognizes.
It’s just the physicality that’s part of the human experience that we miss.
For most of my life, I’ve lived with these two truths within me. This is what my ten-year-old self was remembering. This is what the writer in me has explored and tried to understand. This is where I am now—holding these two inevitabilities that have shaped the way I move through the world.
Fourteen years ago, I was brought back to life. Slowly, over time, as I began to recover from illness, I felt the spark inside my soul that had grown so dim begin to return. And I was irrevocably changed. That’s what happens when you touch the edge and come back from it—life doesn’t ever feel the same.
Because even if we are infinite—spiritual beings moving through something far greater than what we can see—this life, this version of me who loves as deeply as she does, is something I only get once. And I don’t take that lightly anymore. I want to be here for it. I want to live it, fully, as the person I was given the chance to become.
This morning, I had a follow-up phone call from my doctor to go over the results of some bloodwork. The Epstein-Barr Virus I’ve had since I was a kid is active again, which accounts for the fatigue I’ve been feeling. That means the Lyme disease is active, too.
I’m OK. I’ve been here before. I’ve gotten through relapses, and I’ll get through this one. I’m still functioning at a higher capacity than I was all those years ago, and when I look at everything I’m accomplishing, I’m so proud of myself.
Still, there’s that quiet whisper of disappointment that stems from my love of life. I want so much out of this existence, and part of me wonders if I’ll ever see everything I want to see, or do everything I want to do, or love everything and everyone I want to love.
“You have big dreams,” my friend observed tonight. “It’s why we love you.”
I do. I always have. There are big dreams for a big life tucked inside my heart because life itself is expansive and beautiful, and my own soul won’t let me do anything but dream.
But there’s a solemnity that’s comes with being aware of your mortality. You realize that to have a taste of life—true life—is to want more of it, and you can never go back to living the half-life again.
I found myself thinking of death again today—not as something happening now, nor as something imminent, but as an inevitable truth that touches us all. It’s part of the human experience, bringing us deeper into it.
I’m not welcoming death to my door. I don’t want to be sick anymore. I fought so hard to stay and get well, and to be here—functioning and closer to healthy than I’ve been in nearly fifteen years—I can see that there’s still so much more in this life that I want.
I want to fall in love again… and be fallen in love with. I want to know how it feels to be cherished in reciprocity, to share my life and its treasures with a sure and steady heart who wants to share their life with me.
I want to keep exploring the world—this vast, remarkable world. It’s so easy to look at the state of the world and proclaim it as a shit-show, but I look at it and see its beauty, see its gift. I want to touch its corners, traverse its lands, connect with its people. I want to return again and again and again to the country of my heart and plant roots there. I want to live a big life in a gentle way and find my way home, walking along the dirt paths of a village in France to my little cottage surrounded by animals who welcome me at the rickety wooden gate. It’s a specific dream, I know. It’s one that’s held deeply within me.
I want to watch future generations grow and thrive beyond what we could have ever imagined for them. I want to watch my friends’ kids and soul daughter become who they’re meant to be, who they want to be—not shaped by the world, but shaping the world itself. There’s no greater honor than to bear witness to the next generation claiming their place in the world.
I want to take care of my family and friends—to be there for them as they’ve always been there for me. I want to spend my precious time with my animals, to give every animal a loving home—these innocent souls made of pure love. There’s a saying that goes, “to you, they’re part of your world but to them, you’re their whole world.”
I want to keep doing my work. There’s so much more I feel called to do—so much more I want to give in service, in advocacy, in making even the smallest difference. I want to keep lighting candles in the dark.
And my books…
I think about my books. Because they’re not just stories on a page. They’re not just characters or settings or plots that end when the cover’s closed. They’re worlds that exist within my mind, characters that carry pieces of me. They’re my own love letter to life and what it means to be alive.
The Damn Novel is twenty this year. Twenty years, this book has been in my heart. Twenty years and halfway written. Everything else I’ve done is leading to it. It’s the one I carry with me every day, marinating in the back of my mind.
It’s why I’m not ready, why I’m not going anywhere. There’s too much left to say.
There are stories I haven’t written yet.
And more I’ve yet to live.
Want more words?
Read my books!
Available at www.montourscity.com and www.susandawnspiritual.com