In July of 2020, for the third time in this body, I had the unimaginable privilege of being a witness and primary caregiver to someone I love, while they passed from this world to the next. While I have always understood this to be an honor, I have not always greeted Death with welcome. Early on in life she and I had a rather sudden and traumatic relationship (at least when it came to her arriving to escort those around me) and that left me with a lot of fear and resistance toward the prospect of losing others. While I did my best to remain present with those who were passing and fill the role well, away from those whose time had come, I would often have mixed feelings and sometimes resent or question why Death kept placing the responsibility of sitting vigil upon me. Even in cases where I was not the legal next of kin, nor even a blood relation. I wasn’t surprised necessarily, I have a fourth house Saturn, opposite my midheaven and, in my family, initiating the hard conversations and doing the difficult tasks have most frequently, even as a child, fallen to me. But, because I can be stubbornly slow, early on, I couldn’t see why developing an intimate relationship with Death, was also becoming my place.

For much of my life I have experienced this world in the in between places. (natal Sun conjunct Neptune with Pisces rising) Surreal places that are difficult to accurately share with others. Places where time and reality get weird, but are somehow, all the more real for being so. I sometimes tell people I was born twice. Literally, into this body, not in a religious sense. I was born quite premature with an underdeveloped liver and lungs. I’ve always been told, I was born, took one breath, then stopped breathing for ten minutes, at one point being declared deceased, before being revived by a doctor in a Army hospital. He refused to give up on me, and so I began to breathe again. For the first ten years of my life I was in and out of the hospital with asthma, allergies, and multiple bouts of pneumonia.

Combined with all of that, saying I became a weird kid, would be an understatement. I experienced people and the world around me in ways many others didn’t. Though I always had a lot of questions and opinions about things, I was otherwise quiet and intense, even as a toddler. Friends and family frequently commented to my mother that I wasn’t like other kids, and they weren’t sure how to talk to me. I had an ‘imaginary’ friend who asked to be called by a Latin pronoun, and my description of his chosen form would make any good 70’s church goer, want to leave our house and not come back. Intensifying the creep factor, pets, and sometimes other children could see and speak with him, and he told and showed me things I really had no earthly business or way of knowing. When he chose to answer my questions, he always told me the truth, (apparently he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, lie) whether I understood what he said or not, but often he chose simply not to answer. I saw and heard things others didn’t. I knew things about people I hadn’t met and places and I hadn’t been before. That knowledge was and always has been, spotty and random though. Both in what I sensed, and what my friend chose to share. Like Erin Morgenstern writes in The Night Circus, it’s like trying to read a book that’s been fished out of a pond. Some things are clear, while others are blurry and hard to make out, and some pages, are missing completely. I also have a guardian who watches over me, whose shadow I and my mother (and very occasionally others) would catch out of corner of our eye, and we both came to know his name. My Mom and I were always able to communicate with each other without speaking, and early in my life, when we lived overseas, she taught me to play psychic card games. I shared dreams with people I slept near. Often freaking out my sleep over companions by finishing stories of what they dreamed, for them. I unnerved many adults, and often the children of those adults were not allowed to play with me. As I grew older, it got weirder. There were instances where time would slip a bit and I would experience events as much longer, or much shorter than those around me, sometimes interacting with or having intense meaningful conversations, learning things from people, others would later insist were not present, even if I physically watched them also interact with them.

I would often have intense first person dreams, as other people. Men, women, children, sometimes even animals. Both when I was a baby and when I went through puberty, objects defying the known laws of physics, and poltergeist activity frequently happened around me. It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s and had several instances where I would wake up, tell my husband some crazy dream I had as someone else, go back to sleep, and then wake up later that day, and us find what I had dreamed reported on the news, exactly as I had experienced it, that I began to suspect that these might be more than just dreams. Often these dreams involved death, violence, natural disaster, or even murder. A few of these have been incredibly detailed and absolutely terrifying and involved human casualties on a large scale. Though, to be clear, only a very few of these have been verified to have actually happened and often they end up feeling more like ‘possible timeline outcomes’ rather than current events or exact predictions. I can’t count how many times I’ve died or been reborn (both as myself and others) during this life, and when that happens in my dreams, it never seems like a big deal. It feels like a minor inconvenience. Bummer, I’m dead again. In fact, sometimes, in my dreams, I will go back and redo the events leading up to my death several times, until the outcome changes.

“These dreams go on when I close my eyes, every second of the night, I live another life” – Heart

Hard stuff, mental and emotional hard stuff others often find difficult to deal with, are typically things I’ve always been good at. I mean, I don’t enjoy them any more than anyone else, but for whatever reason, they don’t seem to break me, like they do some others. Although there have been times in my life I’ve kind of wished they had, just so someone might take over for me for a while. Owing to all of these experiences, I feel very much like I have lived more than just my own life while residing in my present body. Some theoretical physicists like to tell us that time is an illusion and everything and every time are really happening now. A bit like Griffin from Men in Black III, I sometimes experience the world, exactly that way. Am I maybe just psychically witnessing in the first person pieces of other people’s lives? Or am I maybe acting as some kind of super temporary Sam Beckett, stepping into situations others find it too overwhelming to handle? And if so, where do they go while I’m there? Is this what happens when someone experiences trauma they later “can’t remember”? I don’t know. I just know I’ve spent an awful lot of my time on earth in liminal spaces and I’ve always felt like I’m not entirely in this world, but also not entirely in others either.

“There are other worlds than these.” – Stephen King

Also, despite the negative reactions of the religious adults I encountered as I child, I’ve always acutely felt my own incarnated separation from God. (Whatever that means to anyone.) I remember well when “I” was “We” and while I value the human experience of autonomy and even the illusion of physical separation, more than I can express, it can often feel incredibly lonely, no matter how fulfilling my earthly relationships are.

“In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross” – Billy Joel

No, I’m not mentally ill. No, I’m not schizophrenic. Yes, I’ve been evaluated and I don’t require any kind of medication. Reality is simply different for me than it is for most people, but I am very much able to tell the difference between my reality and what society considers objective reality. I know what happens for me, isn’t always what’s happening for everyone. The difference of my reality hasn’t always been an easy thing for me to admit, and it’s taken me almost a half century to come to comfortable terms with, but it’s how I live in this world nonetheless.

Which brings me back to Death. It’s not like I don’t understand the role of the shaman, seer, or witch, it’s just often my first instinct to resist accepting tasks that aren’t of my choosing. (Mars in Scorpio in the 9th) I’d always much rather do a side quest I agreed to, than continue play the part of the game I’m told I have get through, in order to level up. And yes, I know that’s where the deepest, most important lessons always lie. Yet, I still seem to have a knack for stepping up and doing the hard stuff, while inexplicably fighting against accepting its teachings. Like I said though, I’m stubborn and slow sometimes. (Taurus in the third)

It was only with this last encounter with Death that it finally hit home for me. Of course this is my role! How could it be otherwise? How can I spend my entire life living in these spaces, playing in and learning lessons in these doorways, and not be expected to help those I love and those who love me, pass through them? Death was never picking on me. She never intended to be a burden. Even when the triple shadow of her black cloaked figure showed up outside my bedroom window, for an entire moon phase when I was seven, scaring the bejesus out of me, and exasperating my parents, who weren’t able to see her, it wasn’t malice. It was recognition of likeness. She was inviting me to understand.

It was only the last week of July 2020, that I finally, fully accepted Death for the ally she is and understood the incredible privilege I have in working with her and being able to be present with others as she guides them to the other side. While I had previously experienced moments of clarity and beauty while in the presence of Death (and moments like that are where real magic and the meaning of living and caring for others lie) those pale in comparison to the week I spent wholeheartedly welcoming and embracing her. And she, accordingly, welcomed and embraced my mother, offering to her the love and peace in her next world, she so longed for, but wasn’t able to find in this one. For this, and so many other lessons, I am eternally grateful.