I Died Twice

Here's What I Know...

I have died twice.

The first time, I wasn't ready — though not in the way you might expect. I wasn't frightened. I wasn't desperate to stay. The readiness I'm referring to has more to do with the maturation to understand what the experience was trying to show me. Which is perhaps why it happened again.

I told you I might be a slow learner.

It wasn't like anything I'd read about

My experience wasn't like the stories I'd read about. I didn't see a bright light. I didn't travel through a tunnel. I didn't meet loved ones.

What it was — both times — was a place of peace so profound it has no adequate comparison in living language. Not the peace of a quiet morning or a still lake. Something far deeper than that. A peace that felt like the natural state of everything — as if the turbulence of ordinary life was the anomaly, and this was what had always been true underneath it.

And in that place, knowledge was available. Freely. Immediately. If a question arose, the answer was simply — there. As if it had always been there, waiting. Without effort.

The Review and the Purpose

What I experienced in that place was the many moments of my life. Not as a highlight reel. But as an experiential review — as if I was watching myself live each moment again, both present inside it and observing from a distance.

And what the review revealed was this: every experience I had ever been given — every difficulty, every loss, every pattern inherited from a childhood I didn't choose — had been an opportunity. An invitation to see something. To grow into something. To become more of what I thought I was able to be.

There were millions of instances like this. Moments I had dismissed as ordinary or irrelevant that were, in fact, precisely calibrated for what I was here to learn.

In one of those moments I was looking at a child the way my mother used to look at children — with an expression that communicated, without words, something close to contempt.

And the message was unmistakable: this was an opportunity given to you to do something better than what was given you.

And I had missed it.

Not just that moment. So many moments. A lifetime of them passing through in what felt like an instant — each one a door I hadn't walked through, a seeing I hadn't yet developed the eyes for.

The disappointment was profound. Not cruel. Not punishing. But real. The weight of all that unrealized possibility, held in full view.

And arriving in the very same breath — so simultaneously it could not be separated from the disappointment — was forgiveness. Complete. Unconditional. As if the two were never meant to exist apart from each other.

I had to come back

I have heard many people say they didn't want to leave. That the peace was so complete, the love so unconditional, that returning to this life felt like loss.

That wasn't my experience.

I wanted to come back.

Not from fear. Not because I was afraid of what dying meant.

Because I wanted - badly - to do better.

Because somewhere in that review of everything I had been given and everything I had missed, something clarified. A sense of what I was here for that I hadn't yet fully honored.

And that felt worth returning to.

There is a Map

I know there is a map on the other side of death.

And I know it is good. Good beyond anything this language is equipped to describe.

That is something that will never leave me.

For anyone reading this who is facing a diagnosis, or sitting with the fear of death, or wondering whether any of this — the suffering, the searching, the refusing to give up — means anything at all:

It means everything.

Every bit of it was given to you on purpose.

And you were designed to receive it.

Until next week,

Patricia