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 than what I thought I was able to be.

There were millions of instances like this. Moments I'd 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, the way she used to look at me — 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 the disappointment I had for myself - how could I have missed all of that?

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 place of near death. That the peace was so complete, the love so unconditional, that returning to this life felt like loss.

I felt that peace and that unconditional love, too.

And I wanted to come back to this life anyway. I had to come back.

It wasn't because I was afraid of dying.

It was 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

Now 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's something that will never leave me.

But there is still so much to do and learn here.

Until next week,

Patricia