My first meeting with Death was very early in my life. I know about it from the stories of my parents, especially my father would say how afraid he was he could lose me when I got very sick and I needed a surgery on my back/lungs, only few months old. The second meeting and the first I have a blurred memory of it, is the death and funeral of my great grandmother (side of my father) – she actually raised me for few months as a toddler…I only remember sitting close to the coffin and asking myself why so many people were crying and feeling sad.

There were many other encounters, more or less close to my origin family. For some I cried a lot as I felt that sense of permanent loss and the grieving process lasted many months after the funeral.

Since I have started to explore the shamanic path and healing practice I noticed that my quest on Death and Life sometimes only got me to one aspect: how similar these two realities or energies can be and how thin the boundary between them is.

While working with systemic constellations I also interpreted both energies and I can say one thing: Death is the most powerful one, nobody can beat it, but Life always wins somehow. It is a cycle and an interdependence that no one among us can confront. We have to take them both as they are and accept there is no Life without a Death and that all Death processes will lead to another Birth or Life.

For this post I want to focus on those who feel their Death close and still choose Life…as a coping mechanism. I know it might sound weird what I am going to say, but for those who fear their own Death there is only one way to escape the thought and torment of its ultimate arrival: to grasp any moment of life and live it with hunger and anger. Yes, living and dancing around the Black Lady sometimes brings us the anger against the fatality of Death…and we wish to consume life to the extent we numb ourselves with all kind of distractions that make us feel alive instead of asking to the body…what do you need and feel, what is the gift from Death that you receive? Why Death is so feared instead of being accepted as a natural consequence of decay of a flesh and bone body? How can I make peace with this thought that I belong to Death when time to end Life comes? What if Death is only a portal towards another kind of life?

I believe these are questions that many people terminally ill could ask themselves and probably Peace and Acceptance could be answers or natural consequences of dealing honestly with the answers from the body. There is a lot Despair and Anxiety behind the attempt to prologue life when Illness/Death consumes the body. And I personally sense the fear and numbness behind this despair…and I know from my own studies and practice that when we do not listen to the body and do not consider the hidden mechanisms behind illness and symptoms is very easy to perpetuate this sense of fatality and to give up to ourselves and our self-healing capability.

Our own not expressed negative emotions start to eat our body from inside (most of the cancer forms are repressed emotions transformed in tumor cells spreading inside organs) and to starve our desire to live fully…before we acknowledge them the end sometimes can arrive without even a proper good bye. And then we blame the illness, the fate, the bad nutrition or habits we have created through life and kept alive in an automatic way.

Who else should be blamed then? Our ancestors, having to cope with difficult conditions, war, famine, abuse, crime, slavery and so on? Our parents who traumatized us along our childhood without even realizing what they were doing? Our lovers and spouses, who were just a mirror of our not resolved issues, entangled in their own trauma survival strategies?

Maybe it would be better to not to try to find someone or something to blame and instead accept that the connection with what we carry inside and has not been met or understood still governs our life even into Death as ultimate destiny, before we even aim to reach it.

Not fearing Death but embracing it as a moment of resolution of inner conflicts and traumas would be another way? Maybe, for those who wish to give up, to accept the fatality as it presents itself.

But what if there could be another way? What if instead of battling Death with life promoting strategies (keto or other type of healthy diets, healthier daily habits, all sorts of natural therapies etc. – they might work to a certain extent but in most cases they fail) we stop battling ourselves in the attempt to numb the body and its stories? When we give up control over ourselves, we can embrace that vulnerable side and listen to the voice of the Death from inside…