Isn’t it funny how we take fairy tales and make them our own, dreaming of a future where death do us part. Death becomes the villain of the love story, the thing we hope arrives only after a lifetime together.
But sometimes death comes long before anyone stops breathing.
When a relationship ends, when an identity falls away, when a dream no longer fits, the ending can feel like a symbolic death. Is it possible that the events leading up to death are what we actually fear? The fear of the unknown? Think about it—the destruction of the life we knew, the uncertainty of who we will become. All of this can be terrifying.
In my experience, death just greets us. It is the gentle resting place before the next adventure. It's a transfer of energy.
The beginning of my own ending started in September 2023, though grief greeted me before I even acknowledged the ending. I could feel that the relationship we once shared no longer existed, and that alone deserved to be mourned.
During that time, two songs seemed determined to find me wherever I went. Every time I got into my car, R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as We Know It would begin to play. Another constant companion was Live's Lightning Crashes. Looking back, those songs feel almost like messengers, gently preparing me for what I couldn't yet see—only feel.
I eventually came to think of Lightning Crashes as a song about sacred transition: the mystery of life and death existing together. The Angel/Mother. A soul entering. A soul leaving. Birth and death held in the same breath. The sacred three.
When my ten-year relationship ended, it didn't feel real. We had separated before and always found our way back to one another. Each repair, however, had been weaker than the one before it. This time there was no attempt to rebuild.
For a while, we continued living together, broken up but living as roommates. Honestly, it didn't feel much different from the way we had already been living.
The destruction of the old did not stop there. Other pieces of my life began to crumble as well. It felt like a mass clearing. Parts of my life that I knew were no longer healthy began falling away, yet I clung to them because they were familiar.
I couldn't catch my breath.
It wasn't until he moved out nearly a year later that the truth settled into my body.
This was real.
My life, as I had known it, had ended.
I was a mess.
Life, however, continued moving forward. I accepted a new job, and for the first time I experienced what a genuinely healthy work environment felt like. It was beautiful—and surprisingly difficult to trust. After living in survival mode for so long, safety itself felt unfamiliar.
Journaling had always been a safe space for me, and throughout this journey, it became my constant companion.
At some point, I realized my journaling had changed. I was no longer writing simply to record what had happened. Instead, the pages became a place to untangle emotions, patterns, and distortions. They also became a place to explore the intuitive messages I was receiving and whatever was asking for my attention.
Near the end of one journal, I remember writing through tears:
How am I supposed to do this?
How do I go on?
How do I just leave him behind?
The answer that came was unexpectedly gentle.
No one is asking you to forget him.
Those words changed something in me.
Long before this chapter of my life, I had already been drawn to the idea of Growth From Death. I had experienced a symbolic death before—a collapse of a timeline—but this one reached far deeper than anything I had known. It wasn't simply asking me to let go of a relationship.
It was asking me to release an old life.
Being a grief tender, I had often asked myself why I was drawn to death and this work. Why did the idea of Growth From Death seem so important to me?
I was going to find out.
As I got closer to what would have been our five-year wedding anniversary, I started receiving messages from my spirit guides. They are quite funny!
One morning, while in a state that I would describe as awake dreaming, they were saying:
" You are experiencing a death."
This message came to me in the form of imagery. It was a neon sign, something you would see in Las Vegas, flashing one word:
DEATH
I thought it was funny how they got their very intense message through to me.
From that point on, death was described to me as this:
The transfer from one life to another.
A transfer of energy.
The in-between.
It's a resting space.
Death is the overlap, the transitionary period from one life to another.
Déjà vu is the remembering of a piece of an old life when we have not fully stepped into the next life, just being at the edge of the new. This is why we may experience it a lot as young children.
For a while, there is an opportunity to travel between the old life and the new, but at a certain point, a choice needs to be made: to move forward with a new life, to remain in death, or to go back to the old.
This reminds me of a quote I heard in a podcast discussing Jung's Red Book:
"Death without rebirth is trauma."
This is where the Growth From Death Map became really clear to me.
The Growth From Death Map - Created By Kelly
It is not the prettiest thing, but what transition is?
Transitions are often messy and uncomfortable, even when we know they are leading us somewhere we need to go.
Necessary endings leading to death and growth.
Isn't that an interesting concept?
Death is often seen as an ending, but from what I can tell, it is the place where we land after an ending.
And it is very fertile if we allow it to be.
The image that emerged became my Growth From Death Map.
The left side represents the old life. Its colors are vibrant and varied, but as they narrow toward death, reds begin to appear, symbolizing the pain of unraveling. This is where patterns become visible. Distortions reveal themselves. Attachments loosen. We begin recognizing what is no longer serving us and what must eventually be released.
Sometimes this unraveling holds the energy of a raging forest fire, burning away everything familiar. Other times, I imagine it arrives as a slow and gentle untangling. I haven't personally experienced that kind of ending, but I'm sure it can happen.
At the center is death—a transfer of energy. This is the quiet resting place before the next adventure. The fertile space where grief and reflection are welcomed as the seeds for growth of the new. Here, grief is welcomed rather than rushed. Reflection becomes nourishment. Honoring and acknowledging what was allows pain and possibility to exist together.
The swirling reds and greens represent old patterns dissolving while tiny seeds of new life quietly begin taking root.
It's a portal where death becomes birth, and the cycle begins once more.
Beyond the portal is new life. The greens grow stronger, yet traces of red remain. Healing doesn't erase the past. We grow upon the old. There are still moments of grief, memories that unexpectedly surface, and echoes of what once was. Sometimes those echoes arrive as déjà vu, gentle reminders that the old life hasn't disappeared completely—it is simply becoming part of the story that shaped us.
Reflecting on my own journey, I realize that while I would say a grief journey is not linear, I originally saw this map as a straight line.
End.
Death.
Growth.
Now, standing at the edge of the new, I see something very different.
The journey has never been linear.
It spirals.
It circles back.
It asks us to revisit old places with new eyes.
Today I find myself dreaming again. Not because the grief has disappeared, but because it has made room for something else. My future no longer feels closed.
It feels expansive.
When I was resting in death, all I could see was the space I was in. Even though I knew there was more beyond the boundaries of death, I simply couldn't see beyond it. It felt as though this was my life now—that the present had become the future. Yet being present in this space became part of my healing. Death was not something I needed to escape; it was a place I needed to honor.
While we are in the threshold, travel between both worlds is still possible.
What I've come to understand is that the work begins while we are resting in death.
As we slowly learn to dance with the darkness, we begin planting seeds.
Some will never rise above the soil.
Others will quietly take root in ways we never expected.
Those are the dreams that eventually blossom into a new life.
Now I can see them.
I can also see the threads that still bind me to my past.
I know what has to be done.
It feels as though this is my last time turning toward the old and really seeing it before I let it go.
The final moments of mourning.
Once I cut these cords, it’s done.
It's settled.
I don't have to choose between honoring what was and embracing what is becoming.
I can hold both.
And so can you.
💛 Kelly | Old Soul Coaching
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If you enjoy my work and are navigating your journey as a solo traveler, I invite you to explore Growth From Death: Sacred Transition — A Guided Journal. It can
be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZZWR2S4
