Sitting close to death changes the way you listen.
Not in an abstract way, but in the most practical sense. You begin to hear what actually matters. You notice what people hold onto, even when it costs them peace. You hear the quiet regret of what was released too late, and the ache of what they wish they had trusted sooner.
Death has never felt dramatic to me.
It feels clarifying.
It has a way of stripping things down to what’s real. The urgency falls away. The performances soften. What remains is simple and honest.
You can feel where love lived and where fear shaped the choices made.
Being near death teaches you how to stay.
How to sit without trying to fix what cannot be fixed
How to listen without interrupting the moment with your own needs, to try to make it easier.
How to honor what is ending without rushing toward what comes next.
When you sit with death long enough, you learn that presence is not passive. It’s an active choice to remain when everything in you wants to look away, to soothe, to explain, to move things along.
This way of listening asks for steadiness.
It asks for humility.
It asks you to let truth speak at its own pace.
What surprised me most is that this way of being doesn’t stay confined to those moments.
It follows you back into life.
You begin to listen differently to the living.
To hear what isn’t being said.
To recognize when something is ending, even if it hasn’t been named yet.
To sense when it’s time to stay, and when it’s time to let go.
Death teaches you how to be with what’s real.
And once you learn that kind of listening, it becomes part of who you are.
It has made me, Me. ♥️
