The beginning of my goodbye.

I faced my own mortality a couple months ago.

And not in the way you think.

It didn’t happen through guides, healers, or plant medicine ceremonies.

It happened with a cancer scare.

My mother survived advanced stages of breast cancer, and by the time we found out my father had brain cancer, he only had five weeks left to live.

So when an abnormality showed up in my routine breast exam, all medical alarms went off.

I spent a month in waiting between the breast exam, and getting the results of the biopsy.

A month suspended between all possibilities.

Fear makes our intuition inaccessible. It clouds our connection to our inner knowing, filling the space with imagined outcomes.

I usually find comfort in knowing this is a world of impermanence.

So I wasn’t afraid of dying, and I wasn’t really afraid of being sick.

I was afraid of the impact it would have on those that love me, and the absolute worst case scenario, I was afraid of having to tell my sister goodbye.

The scariest part of goodbye is not the moment it arrives, but the words left unsaid, the love left unexpressed, and the memories left unmade.

We spend so much of life assuming there will always be more time, but the fleeting nature of the human experience is what makes it sacred.

When the fear would fade, and intuition would take its place, I would slip into a deep and confident knowing that I was okay.

I was certain the calcifications had likely been there, I was only now becoming aware of them, and they were of no concern.

But as quickly as intuition would settle in, human doubt would return asking its endless ‘what if’ questions, and in the discomfort of uncertainty, worst case scenario makes itself a home.

For someone who has an innate need to be free, and who feels like my life is truly my own, I was surprised by how much my life felt like it was for someone else.

But facing my own impermanence, my own mortality, and wondering how I would even begin a goodbye made me realize, this life is a continuous goodbye.

Death is not a singular event waiting on us; it is infinite moments woven into the act of living.

We are always saying goodbye to versions of ourselves, to the versions of people we love, and to moments that can never be lived again.

Long before death arrives, we’ve already said countless goodbyes without realizing it.

The final goodbye is simply the last in a lifetime of them.

My spiritual wisdom is not mine alone. It has been entrusted to me through those who have already made life’s great transition, those who have spoken their final goodbye.

Through them, my understanding has been shaped by a perspective that reaches beyond this life.

And, in their own way, they all leave me with the same message: the best parts of them never leave this world. They continue to live on in their children, their families, and in the hearts of those who loved them.

To honor them is to care for the parts of them that still live within us.

This is where we discover the true nature of legacy, not in what we leave behind, but in what continues to live through us.

Turns out those calcifications had been there all along. I was only now becoming aware of them, and they were of no concern.

But something in me had already changed.

I had already said goodbye to another version of myself, the one who lived as though there would always be more time to say goodbye.

My legacy will live in the words I write, in the wisdom entrusted to me, and in the parts of me that continue through others.

So consider this the beginning of my goodbye.