Love It Enough to Let It End
The soul-rattling beauty of being mortal and why your ache is proof you’re awake.
I saw Pope Francis' worn shoes in his humble coffin and felt a familiar lump in my throat. Not sorrow for a distant religious figure (especially since I left organized religion while ago, although damn, there was a LOT to like about that guy in particular),
but the raw fucking recognition of my own mortality staring back at me through the phone screen.
For some of us, existential dread isn't fear of dying itself per se, it's overwhelming grief at the unbelievable beauty of being human. Grief that there could ever be an end to everything we savor: the taste of coffee, children's laughter, the way love smells on skin, the body's electric hum in flow.
I'm afraid of dying because I am so ferociously in love with life (how very type 7 on the Enneagram of me, I know). Can you relate??
This is holy grief.
There's a thundering paradox at the heart of our existence: what makes life precious is precisely what makes it painful.
The same impermanence that creates beauty also engineers loss. The same consciousness that lets us savor also forces us to grieve. A fundamental architecture of wakefulness demands we feel everything… wonder AND terror, attachment AND loss, in a world that doesn't pause for anyone.
Every spiritual tradition worth its salt has tried to make poetry from this paradox (… yes I still love spirituality, just not man made demands on how we operate). The existentialists whispered that consciousness exacts its price. The more awake you become to beauty, the more vulnerable you are to its inevitable passing. Your capacity for awe and your capacity for grief are the same muscle flexing in different directions.
Tantra also understood this when it taught that each moment contains divinity precisely because it won't come again. Each breath, each touch, each glance across a room carries the sweetness of that singular, unrepeatable drop. You're designed to want it all because you're designed to miss it all once it’s over.
That's why our FOMO reveals our aliveness at the most tender, exquisite pitch of awareness. It’s also why ignorance could NEVER be bliss.
Your grief for what you can't experience embodies the hallmark of a soul that understands the mathematics of finitude.
The Mortality Industrial Complex
Have you felt it? That acid burn of shame when you catch your reflection and see your mother's neck starting to form? I did just this past year and was like, WTF?! Where did THAT come from?!
How about that pit of dread when your knees or ankles creak a little louder getting out of bed now?
Or the way your stomach tightens when someone casually mentions how "young" _____ (insert your age) is, and you smile while something inside you screams?
We've been force-fed the most insidious cultural poison: that your body's natural evolution through time is something to battle, something to fear, something to spend billions trying to reverse.
Look at the grotesque carnival around us. Billionaires pouring fortunes into research to upload their consciousness before their bodies betray them. Men in Silicon Valley getting blood transfusions from college kids, harvesting youth like a resource. Women taught to hate the very lines that mark a life fully experienced.
The average American woman will spend $225,000 on her face alone during her lifetime. For what?! To pretend time isn't touching her? To fight the most natural process in existence?
Now, again, let me be clear. I myself, am a vain motherfucker. I am NOT going gently into that good night. HOWEVER, it should be because we WANT to and not because we feel pressured we HAVE to or we’re failing.
Where I live, on the Emerald Coast, it’s become nearly expected to keep up with the Joneses, inside and out. Hang out on any beach here and you’re likely to see a group of women that look like they all walked into a local med spa and said, “I’ll have whatever she’s having.” Copy, paste, copy, paste.
This isn't reverence for the body but rather, war against reality.
And the cost? The precious hours of your already limited life spent agonizing over inevitable change. The mental bandwidth wasted on fighting rather than savoring. The authentic connective moments sacrificed at the altar of preserving some fantasy version of yourself that was never meant to last.
This is what I’m reminding myself of every time I hear that inner critic pop up when I’m about to put on a bathing suit and hang with my daughters or head out with women who started their toxin and filler regimen before me anyway.
In fact, at night, alone with my thoughts, something ancient in me (and likely, you) knows better.
Something primal in us remembers what every other species on earth knows instinctively: we are creatures of seasons.
We are meant to bloom, ripen, and eventually return to soil. Our beauty includes our decay.
What Warriors Know About Mortality
In Bushido, warriors cultivated intimate relationships with their mortality because they understood something we've forgotten: confronting impermanence is the ultimate existential aphrodisiac.
I would argue samurai who embraced "death in everyday life" loved life more fiercely than their peers because they refused to pretend it was guaranteed. Their philosophy centered on the luminous quality of attention that emerges when you stop taking your next breath for granted.
This is what separates the spiritual tourists from the warriors. Tourists want enlightenment without discomfort. Warriors understand that looking death in the face and still choosing to love this temporary existence isn't just courage. It's the only path to authentic aliveness.
Spiritual warriorship demands raw courage to face what's actually true: this particular configuration of atoms forming your consciousness, your loves, your laughter, your particular way of seeing the world, is temporary.
And that temporary nature creates its value. The sunset is breathtaking precisely because it ends and no two are the same.
Death isn't comfortable, and it’s not supposed to be. That discomfort is the very thing that makes life urgent and necessary and worth tasting fully.
Completion, Not Theft
Recently I’ve been contemplating a different way of working with that lump in my throat about aging and dying. A more metaphysical one similar to the beautiful piece Aaron Freeman offered on what a physicist might say at your funeral.
What if aging and dying aren't the theft of life but the completion of it (at least this current iteration)?
What if you're not being pulled away from life but woven into it forever?
Not the end of being human,
but the deepening of being human,
the gathering of all the sweetness and sharpness, the terrors and tenderness,
until you are so saturated with experience
that your soul simply can’t be contained by this body anymore.
Because you drank it so fully
that it overflows you.
Every love you have lived,
every word you have written,
every laughter, every touch,
becomes part of the fabric of life itself.
In this view,
you don’t lose your humanness.
You complete your humanness.
And in doing so,
you give it back to the great, wild tapestry that birthed you.
You don't vanish.
You become part of everything.
You are already eternal, not because you will live forever in the body, but because every act of love, every fierce choice to live fully, stays imprinted in the world you leave behind.
You already see this in the way you touch your children’s lives, your partner’s heart, your clients’ unfolding.
You are already echoing out.
So maybe it’s not about clinging harder.
Maybe it’s about savoring deeper.
Savoring every drop
not to hoard it,
but to let it transform you
until you’re more and more made of life itself.
And when it’s time to leave,
you won’t have missed anything.
You’ll have become it all.
A Savoring Prayer
I want to leave you with a sentiment that is helping me seal all that in… I’m calling it my prayer to savor:
Let me love this life until it overflows me.
Let me taste every ordinary miracle, the way sunlight leans through windows, the way laughter warms the chest, the way grief sharpens my edges.
Let me touch the world with open hands, knowing I can never hold it all, and that is its mercy.
Let me age in fullness, each year another brushstroke of wild color across the canvas of my becoming.
Let me hunger, ache, long and dread and dream, because even these are signs I am still of the living.
Let me die as I lived: unfinished, uncontained, unstoppable, woven into the very fabric of what I once loved so fiercely.
Let me go as one who drank so deeply that there was simply no vessel left to hold me.
I’ll meet you where love and loss share the same breath, dear one. Still wild, and still refusing to fall asleep at the wheel of this one precious life.
- Tamara