Little Death
What I’ve Learned About Living
Once upon a time, my dad and I were driving to Costco.
It was a beautiful afternoon in Virginia, and the leaves had finally reached peak fall maiden vibes. We were listening to public radio when my dad turned to me and asked me an interesting question. He wanted to know:
What was my definition of Existential?
I never took an ‘official’ philosophy class because, to be honest, sometimes I get tired of analyzing the WHY of life. Sometimes I just want to run and scream on the playground with every other hooligan. But for someone who *did* flunk out of Logic (lol) I have often found myself deeply absorbed in the endless, cosmic quest of unpacking and investigating the underlying patterns of our beloved chaos realm.
Like many scholars before me, I turned to Wikipedia to answer a few q’s that came up in the ensuing conversation. The best questions usually beg more questions, and in this particular moment I stumbled across a doozy that I’d like to share with you.
Many people like to ask: What makes a good life?
(I’ll go first: hot tubs, loving relationships, cuddles, community who come through, good food, a sweet crib, hella long baths, free breadsticks, forgiveness, fast internet, etc.) It’s quite easy for this list to go on, for there are many things that sweeten our time alive.
But when an Existentialist inquires: What is life good for?
My answer changes.
•
Scene:
The Metropolitan Museum on Halloween weekend. A good friend and I wound through the the astonishing guts of these hallowed grounds for several hours, spending most of our time in two enormous galleries: Ancient Egypt and Rome. There are almost too many antiquities to absorb it all: exquisite jewelry and sculptures of bearded dudes and grinning gnomes carved from stone and even a temple originally commissioned by the emperor Augustus.
Yet again and again I found myself returning to the funerary vessels.
Many things rendered me mute in that palace of remembering — the most amusing being my (and our) ability to forget. But in one of my favorite places, I was given the opportunity to remember something essential, as it was impossible to ignore: for many ancient civilizations and early peoples, dying was an art form.
•
I didn’t have the framework to name it at the time, but looking back I see now that my first massive death passage happened the year I turned fourteen. That year, I morphed from a shy, introverted daydreamer into an audacious, spicy jester for a multitude of reasons: I was abandoned by my core group of friends, broke up with my first boyfriend, lost the last of my elders, and survived a near death experience when my dad flipped our minivan (on the way to my grandfather’s funeral no less). I didn’t consciously request it, but I received a crash course in letting go that lasted several excruciating months.
When everything else was slipping from my grasp, it became easier to shed the mask.
That same year, my social studies teacher assigned a class project that made me very salty. The “Dream Wedding” was conceived to teach an unruly group of Freshman about financial planning (or something). We were instructed to compile a vision board that showcased our decisions for the big day as well as a budget clearly outlining what these shenanigans would cost. I vividly remember stalking up to the front of the classroom and putting both my hands on his desk.
I was affronted.
“Mr. Kirsch, I cannot complete this assignment!” I stated dramatically. I went on to explain why: marriage was boring and definitely not in the stars for me. Instead, I explained to him, I was planning on having several long-term lovers. One at 20, another at 40, and a final one at 60. I was quite proud of myself for having arrived at such a satisfying formula for my romantic future.
Mr. Kirsch looked at me for a good minute before he sighed and said: “Kat, just do the damn assignment and get an A. That’s all I need from you.” I stomped back to my desk.
Outside of such prescriptive assumptions about how my life would unfold, the real truth of the matter was that I had thought more about my funeral than any dumb wedding to a dude. Diamonds were certainly shiny pretties, but death truly was forever.
My funeral, after all, would be celebrating me and my life: the legacy that I, Katharine Elizabeth Hargreaves, was going to leave behind when I finally surrendered my skin suit and teleported to another galaxy. Such a momentous occasion deserved a few decades worth of dutiful planning.
It all was quite clear to me, even at the tender age of fourteen: an epic, three-day affair in some foreign country because goddess knows that my bones were not going to rot for eternity in Wisconsin. On windswept cliffs that overlooked a vast, hungry sea, long tables heaped with food would be spread beneath open air tents. A spread to make Dionysus weep! I imagined long lamentations and rowdy speeches and perhaps the occasional PowerPoint detailing the trials, successes, and hilarious errors of my life. I wanted nothing spared: no precious goodness ignored, no worthy story left behind. Tell them all, I had already decided. Air every foible and feckless act. Spend every tear. A marching band would occasionally parade through the gathering when things felt too heavy. Drums would be beaten by half-naked men and torches passed out to the children. If everything went according to my plan, a conga line would be inevitable.
Why hold back? When death comes to meet me, I want to greet her like I’m ready.
And of course, when the moment to say goodbye finally arrived, my friends and family (and at least three former lovers) would take the party down to the beach where my body would be laid out on a wooden pyre, surrounded by offerings. Like my Viking ancestors long before me, I want to be witnessed in my final form before I am set on fire and burned down to ash.
•
You see, death and I go way back. I don’t consider myself morbid or even someone who likes to wear black. But when you excel at recognizing patterns it definitely becomes impossible to ignore a pesky death habit.
Whether I like it or not isn’t the point.
I’ve been the lucky recipient of multiple deaths in my life. Otherwise known as a petite mort — or little death (and not the fun kind). Some little deaths have been glorious passages that heralded long-awaited leaps of faith, some have been actual near death experiences, others have been major spiritual initiations that took me to the brink of sanity and back. And some little deaths have felt like being hit by a bus while strolling blind down the street.
I find myself in this place now: shocked by the speed of the unraveling and surprised at how easily a world can fall apart when I’m not doing everything I can to hold it together.
I’m right on time, but that doesn’t make it more enjoyable or any easier on the ego. Case in point: the little death I am currently navigating is a hella hard rock bottom that dissolved my sustaining structures in a span of three months. Which might sound like a lot of time, but definitely isn’t when you factor in that I’ve lived in California for ten years. I was entrenched. But one day it all became clear: I looked around and my place was no longer there. In a nice twist of fate, my dad flew out to drive me home and we got our minivan re-write two decades later: driving cross country for five days with my dog, my worldly goods, and six shrines.
Perhaps that insight is the real treat of this particular lesson: if a life needs extra-strength duct tape just to survive, is that really a life that’s…fully mine?
•
But perhaps I’m looking too hard for an explanation; a way to make sense of a moment that feels chaotic and confusing, disorienting and humbling. Sometimes we don’t get the pleasure of a footnote when a chapter screeches to a halt or the road suddenly throws us in the opposite direction.
For if there is one thing I both worship and hate, it is the persistent human desire to arrive at a definitive answer. That feels like a self-defeating game — one that loses its sparkle when the answer is pre-determined.
Yet ironically I have built my own temple on the grounds of wisdom. Hungry for knowledge, I have chased after those unknowable answers. I learned about death around the same time I discovered the JCPenney bra ads in the Sunday newspaper. I was a voracious, self-taught reader who would snack on any text that sounded remotely dangerous or intriguing. My habit of hoovering up books and sensational headlines thrust me early into adult territory.
This precocious habit of devouring news is how I got exposed to the kind of information that was both astonishing and incomprehensible: the gritty, grisly details of the things humans could and would do to further their own agendas, often regardless of future consequences.
Call me a thot for death, but the truth is I have always sought the forbidden fruit. I simply couldn’t hold back my overriding, all-consuming desire to know about life.
•
Perhaps this is an appropriate time to invoke the old adage attributed to the Dalai Lama (among others): that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
The medicine of each little death has tasted sweet in certain moments. Yet for someone who was so ready to put her fantasy funeral down on paper, (fuck the A, do your thing), I have a vacillating rapport with the teachings and unique evolutionary pressures of my petite morts. Even though I romanticize, I do not always go easily into that good night.
No, sometimes I prefer to fight. Which begs the question: Why?
Being alive does require some exertion — but there is a big difference, it seems, between that and efforting to make something happen. When one is expending more energy than they are receiving back, the equation is out of balance.
I wonder about this formula, and whether this tendency to go too hard at the expense of oneself is innate (i.e. natural) or inherited (an assumed ideal). I’m leaning toward the latter. It feels like another gross symptom of an extractive culture to fetishize forcing one’s will over going with the flow — even if that means everything I’ve worked toward will change (and definitely not at the pace I dictate).
In America, it is far more glamorized to arrive.
Don’t get me wrong, it is way more fun to celebrate the milestones that indicate we’ve gotten somewhere momentous: new job, new baby, bigger paycheck, better boyfriend. But the actual reality is that the road of life isn’t linear, it’s fucking twizted. Progress isn’t forever going up an elevator and getting off spotless at the pearly gates of heaven.
Sometimes progress in the realest sense defies all sanctioned definitions.
•
The Tantric Buddhists believe that life is a vehicle for death. According to their supreme philosophy (as outlined in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying), one’s minutes on this planet is best spent practicing how to die — and if not, you are wasting your time. Contemplating your inevitable extinguishing builds a critical spiritual muscle, to the extent that your consciousness is more able to navigate other realities beyond this one.
Of course, depending on what you choose to believe, this may or may not be a productive use of your life juice. Yet in my investigations into ancient cultures, I cannot help but note that their relationship with death is far more developed than ours; full of respect, deep reverence, and many rituals that happen well before the actual act.
The more I think about what life is good for, the more I realize I’ve been deep in my practice.
I used to have a recurring dream as a child that helped me fall asleep. In this dream, the whole world was edible. I would start at the streetlamp outside my bedroom window and taste it all, as much as I could fit in my mouth.
This particular death has helped me see that life is something I like to eat. In being so ravenous, I have evolved and expanded.
Those who are in relationship with death often see the transition that divides this world and the next not as an abrupt end — a falling off a metaphorical cliff — but rather more of a bridge. A liminal passage or place with its own set of wily conditions.
So yeah, I’m eating dirt for a minute. Thank god it’s good preparation.
•
The last thing I’ll share is a transmission I received from the other side.
One of my most memorable deaths was in 2018, in the mountains of Peru, on ayahuasca — my second journey, to be precise. The first had been cute, but nothing major beyond some funky visuals and a lot of crying. After I received my dose that fateful night, I went and sat down on my mat in the dark.
Then I heard a voice cut through the noise in my mind. It was clear as a bell in a cave and it came from deep inside me, but it wasn’t mine. Show me my highest truth. Not a question.
Hmmm, I thought. Okay. That sounds intriguing.
Little did I know that I had said yes to my own death. What followed over the next few hours does not fit into words, but would change my life forever. The person I was before that night is no longer alive, for she was incinerated by a consciousness of such magnitude that neither the human brain nor human language can hold the full expression of it — just the felt sense that’s been forever etched into my cellular memory.
It’s hard to describe what it feels like to leave time behind, to shed your earthly form, to literally exit life. In my all-consuming obliteration, I lost everything — even my name. I was in the mouth of God, getting chewed up good.
But having is evidence of wanting, is it not? So there I was, covered in vomit and snot and drool, getting to confront the very sensation I’ve been chasing: absolute transcendence.
And from a human perspective, it was fucking terrifying. I wish I could say it felt like a lotus flower blooming in my perineum but y’all. I got baggage still! But know this: when death opened its door and swallowed me like a fly in the night, I had four words to live by and I repeated them like a mantra until I came back:
WOW GOD. FUCK YES.
Whatever happens, I think I’ll live like that.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
