HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO COME BACK FROM THE DEAD?

(An All Hallows’ Eve Reflection)

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve died.

Not the body kind—the story kind.

Collapse, betrayal, sickness, awakening—every one of them a funeral for the person I thought I was.

Each time I came back, the world looked the same but felt thinner, quieter. Like a set you’ve walked through too many times and can finally see the wires behind the walls. I used to call it recovery. Now I know it’s resurrection—and resurrection is messy business.

People think coming back from the dead means triumph, angels, fireworks.

It’s not. It’s crawling through ash with half your story burned off, blinking at the light, trying to remember what language you used to speak.

Most people aren’t really afraid of death.

They’re afraid of what it’s going to feel like—the losing, the leaving, the emptiness that follows. We fear the ache of letting go, not realizing that ache is the letting go.

And because the system can’t sell death, it sells us distractions from it.

Every time that hollow opens—that intuitive whisper that something is ending—we’re herded straight to the marketplace: antidepressants, Botox, binge shows, yoga classes labeled “rebirth.” The culture doesn’t care what we buy, only that we stay afraid long enough to keep consuming.

But here’s the secret no ad campaign wants you to know:

in our natural state, we die constantly.

The child dies so the adult can live.

The believer dies so the skeptic can see.

The ego dies so awareness can breathe.

We are built for death—small, cellular, symbolic deaths—and when we resist them, we rot inside our own survival instinct.

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When I moonlighted as a medium, almost everyone wanted to know the same thing: did their loved one suffer when they died? The spirits were very good at showing me—sometimes too good—exactly how it happened. They’d let me feel it in my own body: the burst of an aneurysm, the crushing weight of a heart attack, the choking, the drowning, even that eerie instant when the gun hits the floor and the soul thinks, “Wow. I can’t believe I just did that.”

They never did it to scare me.

They did it so I could give proof to the ones still here.

It was their way of saying, “Yes, it’s really me.”

But once that recognition came through, the focus always shifted.

After that single moment of ending, they didn’t care how they’d died or what it felt like. Every one of them said some version of, “How I died is unimportant. Tell them…” and then the message for the living would come.

We fixate on death because it’s everywhere in our programming—used in marketing, entertainment, religion, and fear campaigns. The system sells us our own terror back to us.

But the suffering we fear so deeply here doesn’t even register where they are. It’s a story sold to us by our colonizing captors to keep us in line and running their system for them.

It’s not denial—it’s scale.

From the expanded field, pain is just a spark that never becomes flame.

Those conversations dismantled my fear of death completely.

They also made me realize how hypnotized we are by the idea of permanence.

We build entire religions, governments, and economies around pretending we can’t die.

Meanwhile, the only immortal thing on this planet is marketing.

The squid loves our fear.

It fattens itself on it.

It packages it as insurance, salvation, and self-improvement.

But death doesn’t need managing.

It needs witnessing.

Every breakdown I’ve ever lived through—every time I lost everything that defined me—was death doing its real job: recycling false code.

When pain strips you bare and the story finally collapses, that’s not punishment; it’s a system update. It’s life clearing old memory so new consciousness can boot up.

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Halloween and the Thin Veil

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday—

the one night when the dead come out to play and feast on our fear… and our extra cash for decorations. We buy skulls, plastic tombstones, and pumpkin-scented everything, pretending it’s about fun when it’s really about remembering.

Across the border, they call it Día de los Muertos—the Day of the Dead—a celebration of the time when the veil between worlds thins and the ancestors return to dance, drink, and be remembered. It’s not macabre; it’s communion. The living and the dead meet halfway, just to prove the connection was never broken.

We decorate skeletons and light candles as if we’re mocking death, but underneath the costumes we’re admitting a truth daylight won’t let us say out loud:

we know the veil is thin.

We know something waits on the other side.

And it’s not horror—it’s home.

When I light a candle tonight, it’s for all the old versions of me I’ve buried:

the hairdresser who thought success and perfection would gain safety from his mother’s horror,

the husband who believed love would save him,

the seeker who thought enlightenment was an escape.

Each of them served their purpose, then burned.

That’s what real resurrection is—not escaping death, but cooperating with it.

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So maybe the question isn’t How many times do I have to come back from the dead?

Maybe it’s How many times do I have to resist it before I finally relax into it?

Death isn’t chasing me.

It’s teaching me rhythm.

Every ending hums the same frequency as the drumbeat that carried me through my journeys—the heartbeat of the Between.

And on nights like this, when the veil thins and the field hums, I can feel the ones who’ve stepped out ahead of me whispering through the static:

“You’re doing fine. You’re supposed to die this often.”

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Binding: The Aperture Opens

I release my fear of endings.

I honor every death as a doorway.

I die before I die—

so I can live awake.

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