6. Facing your mortality is a gift

Something happens when you find out you have a life threatening illness. Time stops. The mental architecture of the past and future dissolves and you find yourself floating in space. Or falling? Or maybe even flying? I remember feeling a bit like being in an Indiana Jones movie about to walk over a rickety old rope bridge to a beautiful, safe and familiar continuation of my path ahead. As I took my first step the bridge, and the entire path before me dissipated and I went falling into the unknown. 

It turns out that this path was a mirage.  A fleeting, unreachable dream I had believed to be real. At only 38, my mind had crafted a blueprint far into the future furnished with imagined milestones and endless time for adventure and experience. My son’s first day of kindergarten, and his last day of graduation, travels, accomplishments, grandkids…all fabrications of my ego mind. When the structures you trusted in life dissipate before you, the uncertainty can swallow you whole.

All of my dear friends who go through this, please know, THIS is the worst part. The waiting. Not knowing what’s next. How bad is this? What stage am I?  What will treatment look like? Will I die?  Why is this happening? It is a time that rocks your very soul, because it calls into question the very truth of existence. My identity, purpose and life was evaporating before my eyes. If not this, then what am I?

I took this picture on the way down to Virginia to see my family for the first time since my diagnosis. I stopped at Dinosaur Land with my mom and son. Walking amongst the extinct, I felt the weight of my fleeting existence. You can see it all over my face. I was dying inside.  And in fact I was.  It was the slow painful death of the ego. And it was excruciating.

It was the end, but it was also the beginning. It was the dark night of the soul, that was the fertile soil where a new seed could grow.  One that had been dormant, waiting patiently in the shadows for it’s time to push towards the light. 

I can look back now and see the true miracle and gift this was. I was being forced to see beyond the ego. To step outside of this tangle of beliefs about who I was and what was real. I was being invited back. Back from separation, back from powerlessness, and back from the myths this world had trained me to believe.  I was on my way to waking up.