If This Is All There Is . . .

I am not afraid of dying.

Not in the way some people are.

Not in the way that I fear needles or being stranded in the middle of the ocean with sharks surrounding me or even being alone in general. 

Despite what some may think, I honestly don’t flinch at the idea of pain. I’ve lived with pain so long it’s become part of my anatomy… a quiet roommate that sleeps in my joints and wakes in my bones. Chronic pain has taught me the brutal art of endurance. Borderline Personality Disorder has taught me the terrifying endurance of the constant high settings of my emotions. I have watched my own reflection in the mirror turn hollow, watched the shape of my face change as my illness claimed space beneath my skin. I have had nights where my own hands trembled as if possessed by the very ghost of death itself, teasing me from the corners of my consciousness.

I’ve flirted with oblivion more times than I like to admit… through numb nights that swallowed me whole, through the seduction of not existing, through the cold arithmetic of suicidal thoughts that make too much sense at 3 a.m. I’ve felt the breath of death like a stranger standing too close behind me in the dark.

No, I am not afraid of death itself.

What I fear is what I don’t know.

What I cannot know.

What none of us can. Despite any of our beliefs and faith.

It is not the last heartbeat that frightens me… but the silence that might follow. Or worse… the noise of something I cannot comprehend. The questions with no answers. The nothing that might be waiting. Or the something that might not want me.

Even now, years after walking away from religious structures that tried to own me, there’s still a tremble inside me that hasn’t left. A whisper in my blood. A theological wound that never closed. I don’t lie awake afraid of dying. I lie awake afraid I’ll wake up in something I cannot escape. Or nowhere at all.

People speak of heaven and hell like they are absolutes. Like they are neatly drawn maps, like they are certainties on the horizon. But I grew up with the kind of religion that gave love with conditions. That said, “God loves you” ... but with an asterisk. That said, “You are welcome” but never let me forget how close I was to the edge. And I carry that with me… even now. Even when I try not to. Even when I scream it out through poetry or bury it beneath years of therapy and spiritual rebellion. Even when I build new language to explain the cosmos, my body remembers being told… You might not make it. You ask too many questions. You are too much. You do not belong.

That kind of indoctrination brands the soul. Even when the theology fades, the terror remains.

I’ve had this fear since I was a child, though back then I didn’t have the words. I would lie in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin, trying to imagine eternity. A word far too large for a child’s vocabulary, but I tried. I imagined endless white. Or endless black. I imagined being awake forever in a world that never stopped. Or I imagined a sudden, brutal end. No light. No breath. Just… erased.

And the balloon of my mind would fill too fast, too full, until I felt like I would explode.

But nothing has made this fear more unbearable… more intimate, more excruciating… than loving someone the way I love my husband.

Because when you truly love someone, death becomes terrifying in a new way. Not just your own death, but theirs.

I wake some nights and reach for him, just to feel the heat of his body, to anchor myself in the comfort of knowing he is still here. That his chest still rises and falls. That his soul, whatever it is made of, is still tethered to this plane, still tangled up in mine. But my mind… my panicked, overwhelmed, over-thinking, and over-feeling mind… races ahead. It imagines a day I cannot survive… A call I cannot unhear… A silence I cannot fill.

I am terrified of my husband dying.

Not because I think it’s likely. But because I know it’s inevitable one day. Life has shown me how quickly things vanish. How fragile even the strongest people are. How even love can’t hold back the tide of time, of illness, of accidents, of cruel twists of fate.

And if he dies… if anyone I love dies… what then?

Where do they go?

Do they go anywhere at all?

Will I ever see him again? Will I feel his arms around me in some other world? Will his laugh echo in some parallel softness beyond the veil? Or will he be gone… truly, completely, forever?

That is the fear that keeps me in a kind of emotional purgatory. The kind of fear that isn’t just mental but physical. My chest tightens. My hands shake. My stomach coils in on itself… Because I don’t know. And no one can tell me.

People say we’ll meet again. People say our souls are eternal. People say “He’s in a better place,” or “Love never dies.” But I have learned that people say many things to soothe the unbearable. That faith, for many, is a salve. But for me, it has also been a wound. I want to believe. But I have been punished for believing the wrong things. I have been cast out for not believing enough. I have asked too many questions and found myself more alone than when I started.

The terror of losing my husband… of losing any loved one… is not just grief. It’s existential torment. Because I don’t just lose them. I lose the possibility of ever being with them again. And I don’t know how to carry that.

I don’t know how to carry the idea that his hands… his goofy grin, his tender and funny mind… might vanish. That he might dissolve into the universe like a song forgotten the moment it ends.

And it’s not just him. It’s my friends. My family. People who have held me when I wanted to disappear. People who stayed. People who saw me through my ugliest moments and loved me anyway. I love hard. I attach with an intensity that can only be described as cellular. And that kind of love makes death unspeakably cruel.

If the afterlife is real, I hope it is kind. I hope it reunites us. I hope it remembers my love better than it remembers my sins. I hope it does not separate us by labels, by theology, by invisible lines drawn by men. I hope it sees the depth of our connection and says, Yes. You belong together. Of course you do.

But if there is no afterlife…

If death is truly the end…

Then love feels like a set-up. A beautiful, vicious trick. A promise it cannot keep.

Because what is the point of this love… this endless reaching, this wild ache, this sanctuary I’ve built inside another person… if it all disappears the moment our bodies go still?

Unconsciousness… death… is a thief. And so is uncertainty.

And I don’t want paradise. I don’t need gold streets or endless hymns. I just want one thing… to not be separated from the ones I love. I want to know that our souls… if souls exist… can find each other again.

But I don’t know.

And I hate not knowing.

I hate when people say they know when they really can't.

And I hate that nobody can.

Uncertainty is its own kind of agony. Especially when you live with a mind that craves reassurance the way lungs crave air. Especially when the absence of certainty feels like drowning.

This is where (DBT) dialectical behavior therapy has gently saved me… not by erasing the fear, but by teaching me how to hold it without being devoured by it. Radical acceptance has become the scaffolding that holds me up. It doesn’t ask me to be okay with not knowing. It simply asks me to stop fighting the fact that I don’t know.

I remind myself, “I don’t know. I hate that I don’t know. But this is real. This fear is here. And I can live with its weight.”

It’s not defeat. It’s courage in softer clothes.

It’s not denial. It’s surrender in the gentlest sense… surrendering to the truth that some questions do not have answers here. Some truths, we must carry rather than solve.

I still ache. I still have nightmares and wake up gasping sometimes, lost in the void of my own imagination. But I breathe. I breathe through the fear. I say to myself, “If this is all there is, then let me make it enough.”

Because if this life is it… if there is nothing else… then this love matters more than anything. This laugh. This fight. This song I sing when no one is listening. This stupid poem. This sunlight on my skin. This dance in the kitchen with my husband when no music is playing. This puppy sleeping by my head early in the morning. This moment of clean dishes and an empty sink. This drive with my husband while we are stuck in traffic…

It all matters more.

And if something is waiting for us… if there is an after… some continuation, some thread that connects all these souls beyond the limits of breath and blood… then I hope it is a place where love is the only law. I hope it is a place that welcomes complexity. That says, You felt deeply. You questioned everything. You tried your best. And maybe that is enough.

If the afterlife is not kind… if it’s built on punishment and fear as my grandmother taught me as a child…  then maybe it does not deserve me. Maybe I will not bow to a cruel eternity. Maybe I will say, No. I was soft. I was fierce. I loved harder than I feared. And that should have counted for something.

So for now, I live. In a mixture of emotions. In fear. In hope. In the ache of not knowing and the stubborn will to keep going anyway. I wrap my arms around my husband at night and say, in my mind and sometimes out loud “You are here”. That is enough. I’ll tell my closest friends I love them. I write poems that bleed. I sing songs that don’t fix anything but keep me alive.

Maybe being alive in spite of the fear is the bravest thing I’ll ever do.

So I breathe.

I breathe through the horror of uncertainty.

I breathe through the ache of future loss.

I breathe through the unanswerable.

And I whisper, over and over, as a lullaby to my fear…

“I do not know. I am afraid. I accept the fear. And I will keep living.”

For me. For them. For love. For now.