The Light of Death
3 Oct 2024: This piece was just republished by Braided Way magazine. I am honored!
Lately I’ve been entranced with the Light at the end of the tunnel. The Light I saw and felt when I faced death up close three years ago. The striking, playful gaze of a child. The glow in the face of an elder who is not far from their last breath.
On February 16, 2021, I was gifted a near death experience (NDE). In the hours after my skull was cut open for a massive brain tumor to be removed, the core of my being — my pelvis, my belly and entire center — was pummeled by a cascading pool of golden stars. Unquestionably, it was divine Light pouring into me, filling me up with the waterfall of Love that I embody, during brain surgery. I saw the Light, glowing, ablaze, an eternal pool that lives within me. It lives within all of us; we simply are not usually in touch with this.
Near death is quite a show.
Since then, I often feel like I’m skipping down the sidewalk on a ribbon of yellow stars. I don’t fear death the way I used to, because I know it is a vast display of Light — not an ending. There is no pain there, on the other side. No suffering. No loss. No fear. Only the infinite expression of Love that is… who we are.
On that Neurosurgery operating table, I was given a choice.
I was invited to leave my body.
Why did I choose to stay?
I am a mother. A child chose to come through my body into this world of being in a body. My daughter, Helena Beam, named after Light, picked me to be her mother — and she wants me here. Before I left home for surgery, she gave me a drawing of two unicorns and in her 7-year-old handwriting, she wrote “Mama, Love Helena” above their horns. On heavy meds after surgery, I gazed at that drawing taped on the wall beside my hospital bed.
Even deeper, perhaps, than choosing to live because I am a mother, I chose to stay because I love being in a body.
The human body is impeccably masterful at the most difficult art and science: communication.
It is an astoundingly intricate weave of relations, its intelligence so advanced that human consciousness may take thousands or even millions of years to understand its capacities. Every second, it is working for us — to process the toxins we eat and inhale, in devotion to homeostasis. Every second, the body is communicating with us — its needs, desires, joy and pain.
For this one truth alone, we could bask in gratitude for days.
It took me 46 years and a horrific massive brain tumor experience to decide to be my body’s best friend. Some people decide before birth. Some, when they’re 16 or 30. Many go to the grave without having made this commitment.
Are you your body’s best friend?
This is an aspect of what Leaning Into Light means. While we are in our bodies, will we choose to lean into the divine Light we are, as a living expression of this glow… or will we succumb to the powerful pull of fear, always available to tempt us?
The truth is we all do both.
Life is a constant dance of recovering to Love, recovering to ‘leaning into Light’.
Thank goodness it feels better to lean into Light.
I am eternally thankful that I chose to live, and that my choice was honored — by The All, by God, by my lungs, veins and prefrontal cortex. Greeting death is far more beautiful than I ever knew.
So last year, I wrote my own eulogy. Having seen the Light in death’s face, I’ve been motivated to slow-dance with it more often. My eulogy isn’t something I’ll share publicly; it is an intimate glimpse back at what I’d like to have shared when I die. It is a written expression of deep self-worth, my own proclamation of how vivid a Life I’d like to keep living.
Here’s an offering from Spirit Rock: A Year to Live. Spirit Rock writes, “In our largely death-denying modern culture, few are encouraged to actively contemplate the inevitability of our death, or the idea that it could happen at any time. The Buddha recommended that we do just that, not to frighten us, but rather to use death as an object of contemplation to help us awaken to the fragile, fleeting, and precious nature of our lives.”
You are so loved,
Jess
Jessica Rios
Writer + Love Coach
Founder, Making Love to Fear + Leaning into Light
beautiful. only love and light on the other side.