Dear Death,
Last night I saw you embodied in the actress Aubrey Plaza as a character in a fun and surprisingly moving television series based on comic books. The morning before that, I saw you in a Tarot card I’d drawn for a friend, riding a fierce steed but holding a bony child in your arms with exquisite love and tenderness. The image surprised me, because that is how you appeared to me a few months ago when I spent a month contemplating you and your beingness in life. You presented in my imagination as a bone woman with swarming snakes for hair, holding your bone child to your ribs where your breast might be, and pointing.
When you came to me then, I was not dying in body but in spirit, having had to confront patterns of being in life that were weighing me down and needed to be released. My approaches to work and caring for others were burning me out, and in need of transformation, and to make those changes confronted me with my own guilt and fear. And you were there, not so much doing anything, but simply witnessing me as I witnessed you, and in your presence those rigid expectations began to rot and fall away to become soil for new growth.
What the comic book show really got right about you is how much witchcraft is about loving and befriending you, beautiful Death, and how that love awakens the vigor and fierce joy of being alive. To love you is not to surrender to nihilism, not to allow our most violent impulses to rule us. To love you is a balm to those aggressive urges that want to hold on to what was and avenge what is already hurt. When our fists, bloodied and bruised, still cling onto what poisons us, you enfold them in your soft palm and gently press until our fingers relax and open and let go of what no longer serves.
It is normal to hate and fear you, because you take from us so many in untimely ways, people who deserved better or longer lives, but fairness and rules are not your concern. You simply are, and you show up when the time comes. Those of us who remain must remember you. Our lives depend upon you, because we feed upon other creatures who must die so we can live. And we cannot escape you, and we cannot know when you will take us, and that knowledge is bitter, and that bitterness makes the orange sweeter.
Dear Death, I am sorry already that I know I will forget my love for you and your kindness, and I will fear you again, and I will hate you for what you take from me, and I am so grateful to know that these feelings do not touch you because you know exactly what you are. You are life. Through you new life comes. If you were not, I would not know how orange blends with pink and then dark blue during a sunset. I would not have felt the sweetness of a melting popsicle running down my fingers on a hot day. I would not have had so many joys and blessings that came because I finally surrendered to you and let go of that which weighed my spirit down.
All my love.