kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with death

Halloween seems to be as good a time as any to talk about the dead, ghosts, revenants, and the afterlife, I think, as it is one of the days of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest and it is somewhat easier to communicate with those who have passed on. My father left this world at the age of 85 a week ago and I have found that his transference to the more subtle planes has been smooth sailing, all things considered. I have known others who shall remain nameless who were not so willing to make the transition, and because our civilization has such a problem with open discussions of death, I would like to discuss death and dying in this rare forum where we can honestly talk about the kind of ending of us can escape.

There seems to be an unwritten law in place that the amount of dissonance a person will have about death and dying (including his or her own death process) is proportionate to the lack of genuine spiritual work they have done while on the meat plane. The scanty few Christians I have known who have done legitimate spiritual work are completely at peace with the idea of death despite Christianity's schizoid views on what happens after death. Atheist agnostics who are generous to a fault or grateful to a fault have the same peaceful, accepting vibe. Spirituality is not the same as religion, though the two are not mutually exclusive.

I'll Say It Again: Meatworld Sucks

The ultimate goal of spiritual literacy seems to be not the factoids one can memorize about the history of magic and religion or the verses of holy books recited from memory but sincere and earnest attempts at communication with the Divine. Meatworld sucks and the only way it can suck less is by talking to entities far smarter than we are who are mostly not found among the ranks of other human beings. The only way we can try to talk to these intelligent beings is to put effort into reflecting their best aspects. Like us, many intelligent beings are flawed: just because someone is much further along on the path than we are does not mean he or she completely lacks faults. Athena got so angry at Arachne, she regressed the girl back into a spider's form. Perhaps Arachne deserved it, but it does seem a bit harsh. The Christian god contradicts himself every five pages of the "infallible" Bible, and Allah does the same every five pages of the Quran. Rather than discarding Athena, Yahweh, and Allah for their inconsistencies and blunders, I think it may be a better strategy to look at what they have done right, because despite them being wrong every now and then, they are still far smarter than I am and I still have much to learn from any given one of them in my primitive, ambulatory ape condition.

The Lucky Winner

I hit the jackpot at ten days old when I was given up by a twenty-two year old sansei college student who fled from the East Coast to Chicago in order to bear the shame of unwed pregnancy. Through a bunch of uncanny coincidences, I was brokered to a thirty-something couple in an up and coming suburb. Adoption being what it is, my white parents were charged a small fortune in order to get a half-Japanese, half-white baby. I looked a hell of a lot more Asian back then, and my parents realized it and decided to name me Kim (hilariously a Korean surname, but what did they know?) instead of naming me after one of my adoptive grandmothers. As a baby, my parents tell me I slept an extraordinary amount, to the point where they worriedly checked on me to make sure I hadn't died. Within the window of a year, my mother was pregnant with one of my brothers. I like to believe my adoption had something to do with it, or at least with the kind of relaxation required for nature to work its course in accordance with will.

I started out with what appears to have been a single lousy parent (birthfather reportedly was not at the birth to sign the papers) and quickly got passed into the hands of the world's best parents. Despite life's dramas and troubles, we all stuck it out and I was never away from my family for any significant length of time. Along the way, I grew up, got married, forged a career in music teaching, and realized an odd part of my destiny.

When I was about fourteen, the phrase "My eyes have burned with the living and shone with the dead" burned itself into my consciousness like an annoying ad jingle. I still don't really know what it means. I have some suspicion it refers to a predisposition on my part for talking to dead people. In junior high, one of my classmates who I did not know or hang out with hung himself in his bedroom. Though I never saw his detached spirit, I am fairly certain I had a bunch of conversations with him for about a week after he took his own life. I also talked with dead historical figures in my head -- if I was studying them or reading/listening to their life works, I tended to talk with them as if they were conversing with me. I don't feel this is unusual at all. I think the dead kid talked to others besides me the week after he died; the difference is that other people did not have the natural ability to talk to him as easily as I did. The same is true for the dead historical figures.

Talking to the Ecosystem

Talking to yourself is common. My Dad did it a great deal -- he was a funny guy and would often speak funny, self-deprecating comments aimed at himself. I talk to myself. I don't think people who talk to themselves are actually talking exclusively to themselves. I had a schizophrenic neighbor who would yell obscenities and unpleasantries as he walked up and down the block. Sometimes he would run down the sidewalk, charging like a bull. Though modern psychiatry considered his ailing brain a faulty universe of one, I think he carried with him a host of malevolent non-corporeal beings who liked to torture him. Perhaps some of them were demons -- I don't know. Though I could be an exorcist in a future life, I don't think that is going to be my occupation in this one. My hypothesis is that we all have communities of beings who hang around us all the time and we are constantly conversing with those beings. When we become spiritual, we raise the vibe of conversation and leave behind the more hopeless and negative beings in order to "hang out" with some of the smarter, more helpful ones.

My friend's mother died at the age of 90 in her home a couple of years before the whole Coronatarian debacle. I was there at her bedside along with my friend with one of us holding each hand as she slipped away. Some deaths are fast and some are slow. In her case, her deterioration was slow but sure. In the end, she was sleeping nearly all the time. I visited my friend for one of the holidays and she had been sleeping and going in and out of consciousness all that week. Once I got there, she had a moment where she rallied, her eyes opened a bit, and she looked into her child's eyes and said goodbye. Her consciousness ebbed as we cried and watched.

I was grateful for that experience because I was able to see the signs when my father started to leave this world. When an elderly person is getting close to death, they become much paler and their mouths change shape. It becomes harder for them to smile; death seems to love a frown. Their chins recede. Their muscles become soft, flabby, and atrophied, like wet sand in a rubber balloon. For the sensitive, their energy is different. My father's life force weakened considerably after a series of prostate events and medical procedures that started about six years ago. His death was as much due to old age as to iatrogenic injury, but that is a topic for another time.

The etheric body is the layer of energy that animates the physical body. All physical beings have etheric bodies. In the case of humans and other animals, our etheric bodies are what make us alive on the physical plane. When we die, the etheric body takes longer to die than the physical body by anywhere from a week to a few months. When my cat Kiki died, it took a few months for her etheric body to die. If the dead person is cremated, the etheric body is obliterated upon the moment of cremation. The pyramids of the Pharaohs were attempts at keeping the etheric body alive by nourishing it with sacred and blessed objects (and often slain servants and pets) which also had their own etheric bodies. There is something about preserving the flesh form that seems to sustain the etheric body far beyond physical death, but those ghoulish arts have been all but lost in the modern era.

Dealing with the Old and Dying

In a civilization that fears, hates, shuns, and avoids death, it can be a real undertaking (see what I did there) to deal with the aged in a rational and sane manner. I love lists, so here is mine for handling the aging and dying process with an elderly loved one.

1. BE THERE. If you live far away, move closer. As much pride-swallowing as it took to move back in with my parents when I was at the ripe age of 41 and my husband well into his fifties, I regret absolutely nothing. Yes, it was humiliating to reveal to all the nice neighbors that my husband and I were fiscal idiots. Sometimes it was unbearable to be so childlike and dependent and that is why we ended up in our own house about 40 minutes away by car. The trend of atomized families makes sense only if the relative in question is thoroughly horrible and awful. Otherwise, living with or near family is a blessing.

2. Let them eat coffee cake. I have been an ethical, whole foods vegan since 2010 and I did my level best to change my parents into vegetarians back in the day, especially when I was living at their house. I cooked my parents lunch almost every day during a two year stint of living with them so much that my husband complained he missed my meals because he was at work! As my father became more aged and infirm, I walked away from trying to get them to eat healthy, in fact, I was the one buying them KFC and kolachky because that is what he enjoyed. Once again, I have zero regrets and I know letting him eat junky garbage was the smartest and best thing I could have done. The end of life is a hospice and if someone is eating the "bad" stuff or taking the "good" painkillers, it's too damn late to worry about their deleterious effects. If they have anything even close to the look of death I described above, it is likely they won't have much of an appetite. From what I have seen of the aged in my life, if the elder is anywhere north of 75, it seems like a good time to loosen dietary restrictions and get out the opiates and marijuana.

3. Start talking to the dead NOW. Chances are you are already talking to them. Talk to your dead grandma as if she was still there. Resolve the emotional baggage about the dead people now and those who die later won't be so difficult. When someone dies, he or she dissolves but does not go away entirely. His or her higher self, the self that made him or her incarnate in the first place, is still there. My Dad's higher self, with his compulsive generosity, excellent sense of humor, and cheerful helpfulness, is now part of my spiritual ecosystem. Whenever I choose generosity in the face of worried parsimony, humor in the face of fear-mongering, and helpfulness in the face of selfish greed, I invoke my Dad and his higher self lives through me. I can still talk to him without pining away in despair that he is gone. When you talk to your "ancestors" or in my case my adoptive ancestors, you are talking to their higher selves. When you die, it is my profound belief that like my Dad you will go to a place beyond space and time where you will hang out with the higher selves of the people you loved and who loved you in this and other incarnations. Your higher self is likely hanging out with dead people from your current and past lives right now. The more you work on your higher self by discarding greed, hatefulness, covetousness, and other deadly sins the easier it becomes for you to commune with your community of higher selves. You become conscious of them as much as a being trapped in Meatworld can become conscious of them.

We live in a spiritual Dark Age. Mainstream religions have wandered well into the ballpark of materialistic atheism. Materialistic atheism has almost no tools to deal with human death, as it is in complete denial of the afterlife. Because of this lack of tools, funerals have become yet another expensive, corporatized, dehumanized rite of passage. To die is to pass through a depersonalized, one-size-fits-all grist mill for making money off the bereaved.

Our age's terror at the prospect of the yawning memory hole of death manifests in psychotic symptoms. Nobody is supposed to look old and death is better hidden and unobserved. The elderly are warehoused so they can be forgotten in a kind of grift oubliette. Families are atomized, begging the question, What is the point of having children if you cannot expect them to care for you in your old age?

Many Ways to Die

Though there are many ways to die, there are two main types of death: expected or unexpected. Overall, expected deaths are better for all parties because there is a chance to prepare. Unexpected deaths are where things can get stuck. Stuckness occurs in situations where death occurs by murder, heart attack, stroke, accident, suicide, or when an aged or infirm person has not made their peace.

One way or the other, when we die we see parts of the astral plane fabric that are not visible in normal, physical life. This is where the reporting of a bright, white light comes from in the NDE or Near Death Experience. Unless you have gone out of the way and taken special pains to be a horrible person, chances are you will see the white light and be beckoned by its warmth and acceptance. I fully expect to see the white light. Though my life has been far from perfectly-lived, as it stands I have tried for many years to be a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest amount. Once you are received by the white light, there is a another reception on the non-physical side. From what the dead have told me, we are received by our assigned spirit guides and by the HGAs or Holy Guardian Angels of our loved ones, including pets, places, and in some cases, objects. This is why dying brings a feeling of going home, even if your Meatworld home was transient or a tar-paper shack on the side of a garbage dump. You are briefly greeted by guides who comfort you and brought to a place of intimate familiarity, love, and genuine rest before being dunked into the Underworld.

We All Go to Hell, Regardless of Hand Baskets

The Underworld is my catch-all term for the kind of non-eternal hell or purgatory every human on the meat plane must go through before reincarnating into a new form. The concept of hell and heaven is where most mainstream religions go absurdly and spectacularly wrong. Buddhists obsess about avoiding the incarnation process altogether, hoping and trying instead to escape the wheel of meat-plane cycling to skip the line to a subtle and masterful non-physical state. They are not the only ones who fixated on escape: Aztecs and Mayans made the avoidance of our current demonic, materialistic age into an art, absorbing village after village primarily to attain victims for blood sacrifice. The point of the sacrifices was seemingly to keep the priestly class out of incarnation and to prevent the world from becoming what it is now. Christians misinterpret the Underworld cycle as an eternal pit of torture and pain for the unrepentant wicked. The only alternative in this binary is an equally unbalanced assumption that they will sit for untold trillions of millennia at the right hand of Jesus based on the judgement of the works of a single human lifetime. Only Hindus, who can proudly boast the world's most ancient and enduring religion, see the reincarnation process with a sense of balance. Even they err by playing into the caste system, which has horrific repercussions for almost anyone who has ever believed in it. The haughty presumptions that arise from belief in the caste system are kissing cousins to boneheaded Quranic and Biblical literalism.

As I have mentioned in the past, an entity once shared with me that the grace with which we accept our judgements and descent into the Underworld determines how much bounce we will gain before going into our next incarnation. My childhood as Baby Kimberly was terrible, and not because of anything my parents did or where and how I grew up. My childhood was awful mostly because of the anger and sorrow I failed to resolve from my previous life. In my most recent past life, I was a wealthy but embittered widow who lost her two sons in World War I. Her unhappiness leaked into this life. Many of her emotional issues were still on the table for resolution well into my current lifetime.

Once we have spent time in the Underworld going through the nasty process of sorting through most of our mea culpas and stupid crap we did that hurt our fellow sentient beings while in physical incarnation, we bounce back up to the higher astral plane in order to get ready for our next incarnation. Contrary to popular mainstream religious belief and based upon what dead people have told me, we do not get a choice whether or not any part of these processes happen. We cannot choose incarnation any more than a fish can choose to live in water. As the world ebbs from its current peak, some souls will stay out of incarnation for longer periods and others will be reincarnated as animals. Of course I could be wrong.

Despite the way we have been trained to look at it, death is a good thing. That said, ending your life prematurely can have dire consequences depending on the intentions behind the action. At any rate, it does not speed up the resolution of any of your problems except on the most superficial level.

They're Still Here: How the Newly Dead Interact

I operate under the assumption that the newly dead can still see us and interact with us on the astral and etheric planes despite being divorced from the physical plane. When my friend died of cancer in his sixties, he visited me during my daily Sphere of Protection and said that from his end of the astral, it looked like a fireworks show. There is nothing strange about talking to the newly dead; in fact, it would be better if we all learned to talk with them. There is also nothing strange about a dead person informing their loved one they have died. This is usually called a haunting but I think this is far too dramatic a term. The facts on the ground are the etheric body sticks around for most of the time there is still a corpse. Cremation severs the link and immediately dissolves the etheric body. When I die, I am specifically asking in advance not to be embalmed because I feel preservation of the corpse ties the astral and etheric bodies to Meatworld for far longer than necessary. When I die, I expect to hang around Meatworld until I am either cremated or rotted in the ground from being buried. Freed of my physical body, I will wander about visiting any friends or relatives I have left. If they are used to interactions with spirits of dead people as I am, I will try to give them an etheric sign of my presence, such as a candle burning brighter or the scent of citrus, mint, roses, or incense. If they are a normal person who gets freaked out by occult phenomena (likely) I will only observe and keep my energy to myself.

Once my etheric and physical body separate anywhere from a few days to a few months after my death, I expect to be led by my spirit guides and my own higher self as I transit out of Meatworld and my old incarnation as Kimberly Steele. If my experience as a dead person is a typical one, and I believe it will be, we can use it to inform us how to help the newly dead find their way in absence of their physical and etheric bodies.

Candles and Flame

Just as regular incarnated humans are drawn to burning campfires, fireplaces, and flame, candles draw both non-embodied humans and spirits. Lighting a candle for a dead person has the same effect as giving them a powerful flashlight on a dark road. Candlelight vigils should be done for any newly dead person in the spirit of helping them through the immediate afterlife process. Candles burned at the place the newly dead person loved and/or considered home or best: they act as amplifiers of comforting energy and draw spirit friends to the corresponding area on the astral plane.

Flowers

Regardless of whether the person liked flowers while alive, fresh flowers are etheric plane improvers that act similarly to candles; that is to say they are amplifiers of comforting energy that bridge the etheric into the astral. Once again, flowers provide a temporary energy source that draws benevolent helper entities. What we think of as flowers are no more and no less than magical herbs. Herbalists know that herbs have the power to drive away malevolent energy via banishing and draw helpful energy. The result is greater illumination and purification on the path out of incarnation for the newly dead person.

Music

Music is an extremely potent purification tool and is very effective when assisting the newly dead to connect with their higher selves and helpful spirit guides on the astral plane. Like flowers and flame, music repels malevolent entities and provides a bright spot on the astral plane so the newly dead can rally and prepare for their next steps. It's especially powerful and helpful to play the music the dead person loved in life, even if it isn't the most agreeable music to the still living. While playing the newly dead person's favorite music, send the intention of gratitude for their time in physical incarnation, no matter how brief. Even unborn babies have "favorite" music that sensitive mothers can determine while they're still in utero. While sending gratitude, also send wishes for their smooth and easy transition through the Gates until you see them again.

Prayer

Prayer is the most important tool we have in our arsenal for helping the newly dead. The goal of prayer is simple: we ask a deity who is older, wiser, and smarter than we are to help with something they know a great deal about while we ourselves know very little. In other words, we do what is perfectly logical. The more connected the newly dead person is to the Divine, the easier their transition out of Meatworld will be. The reason it is tremendously important to live a virtuous life by being generous, kind, compassionate, fair, modest, diligent, and moderate is because living the Word is far better than preaching it. Unfortunately, it is common among monotheists to abuse prayer as conversion cacomagic: they take any fledging connection they have with the Divine and use it to guilt trip and browbeat others into serving their specific God. This act is ironically Satanic and will likely earn them long stints in the Underworld where, as the Bible says, "they shall have their reward". Instead of telling others how to accept your version of Jesus or some other god into their hearts, you go first by connecting to a god and doing your level best to serve that god with humility and grace. Connection and discourse with the Divine drives out parasitic, opportunistic entities while affording glimpses of the afterlife process well before it is time to go to the afterlife.

Letting Go

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, our civilization has a problem accepting death. We have a problem with divine grace and become dissonant when dealing with endings. Grace means not clinging to what once was and not pining after what was not meant to be. As far as I can tell, most of the dead move on fairly quickly -- a few days to a few months -- unless we compel them to stay with constant, intense, unrelenting grief. When you are tempted to wallow in grief, light a candle and focus on the moments and legacies of the person, pet, or house that were given to you and ruminate about how your life is better because they were there for you in this world. By focusing on the good and adding gratitude to the mix, you improve and sublimate their journey as well as your own, no matter where they are. When you see them again, and I believe you will, they will thank you for it.

True confessions: I still have Netflix. To be specific, my husband still subscribes to Netflix and I occasionally watch a movie or a television show on my computer from it as I do not own an actual TV. At any given moment, Netflix has at least fifty zombie-themed shows on it. If I subscribed to other streaming services, I’d have my choice of several hundred zombie movies and television series with which to waste a chunk of my time, and this is to say nothing about the plethora of zombie novels I could be reading or the zombie video games I could be playing. Zombies are such a dominating theme in our culture that it begs the question: Why is our culture so obsessed with the undead? What are we trying to work out of our collective system?

Fear of Death

I state the obvious (plus I sound like a broken record) when I say our culture suffers from an excessive fear of death. The reason most people cannot calmly and rationally process natural death and become complete emotional basket cases when presented with random or unnatural death is twofold: there is a general disbelief in reincarnation and because of it, most people have many dramatic misconceptions about the afterlife.

I didn’t believe in reincarnation myself until five years ago. It’s only due to my study of occultism that I’ve arrived at my current set of beliefs. When I was raised as a casual Christian, I held the equally casual belief that a life of good works would mean my immortal soul would spend an eternity in heaven and a life of debasement would mean an eternity in hell; a binary. I didn’t honestly believe in either one despite having an extremely vivid imagination. By the time I reached my late teens, it was obvious that hell was immediate and all around me in the form of severe depression, night terrors, and suicidal ideations. Christians and Christianity had zero remedies for my depression or nocturnal attacks from the creatures of my “imagination”, which of course I was told to dismiss as my own brain playing tricks on me. Imagine if I had been shown how to pray by an actual devotee of the Lord Jesus instead of being feared and hated for dabbling in witchcraft in a desperate bid for magical defense. Alas, it was not to be, and there were no competent witches leading the way either. By age twenty, I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became an atheist out of disgust and frustration. As an atheist, I faced the idea of death as an eternal void. From nothing I came and to nothing I would return. I was not bothered by such an idea, in fact, I welcomed it. No pain, no joy, just nonexistence on all levels.

The zombie’s dead-but-not-really-dead state reveals confusion about what happens after death. Instead of letting go of a deceased person’s mortal shell so their higher bodies can rest before reincarnating into new material selves, there is a fear that their spirits will become wraiths clinging to the mortal form shortly before being returned to the endless atheist’s void that lurks behind the Christian’s binary belief in eternal heaven or hell. The real death of Christianity happened when Christians began questioning eternal heaven and hell: to do so was a tacit acknowledgment of the potential superiority of Buddhism and Hinduism, at least in regards to beliefs about the afterlife.

Profit and Loss

Somewhere along the way, western culture lost the plot and let stigma about death run wild. The Irish wake and sitting Shiva were antiquated customs before the salary class lost its damn mind over Covid 19, nowadays, the suggestion of such practices as good ways of processing grief would get you laughed out of the socially-distanced Zoom room. Speaking of manufactured isolation, it’s no surprise that doctors and nurses who should have known better than to fiddle while Rome burned expressed their pathological need for peer approval by using their copious free time to choreograph complex dance routines in empty hospital wards, especially when said hospital wards were allegedly overburdened with Corona patients. At this very day and hour, medical professionals continue to make money hand over fist for each new patient admitted with the label Covid 19 victim stamped on his paperwork. The unaddressed stigma surrounding death has become so acute, much of the world has allowed the travesty of forcing those who are close to death to face it alone, or worse, surrounded by forcibly-vaccinated strangers who may or may not look after their needs between TikTok twerking parades.

Pod People

Scratch the surface of Resident Evil or The Walking Dead and the truth bubbles to the surface: hell is other people. The zombie trope comes from the fear that other people cannot be reasoned or empathized with and that the only remedy for their kind of stupid is an axe between the eyes. Atheism was satisfying to me because it engaged my inner serial-killer misanthropy. I wasn’t worried about being judged for what I felt, said, and did because there were no judges. It’s incredibly easy to feel like one of the smartest people on Earth as an atheist. The atheist is the ultimate Libertarian. Zombie movies are scary because they are reliably about mass infestations. The whole world of doofus poop-for-brains goes against the hero and her band of plucky survivors.

The above is why I say leftists are playing with fire as they try to usher in communism. They have given the average casual Christian and atheist every reason to believe himself a plucky survivor on an onrushing zombification of his part of the world. Leftists, in their Piscean fashion, are struggling to instill a hive mind, hegemonic, unified way of life. They are doing this utilizing most of the key features of National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism. In the eyes of the right, they are communist zombies: unthinking, dangerous, and diseased. I personally maintain that Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the Clinton family, and various other rich leftist figureheads will go to the modern equivalent of the guillotine in my lifetime. I don’t wish for this to happen because I don’t do that anymore. It’s just what I see as the logical progression of events when you inflame a bunch of average people to imagine themselves as heroic defenders against the zombie horde.

The Boy Who Cried Apocalypse

Another trope getting an ample workout these days is the Apocalypse narrative. In both the film and the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the world has become a hellish battle for survival for a seemingly-chosen few who have kept their souls and morality intact. Everyone else in the nearly lifeless hellscape of (possible) nuclear winter does things like rape little boys and eat newly delivered babies. The Road is not a story for those with weak stomachs!

It’s much easier to see one’s enemies as slavering, cannibalistic villains instead of considering them as flawed human beings capable of a spectrum of goods and evils. The Apocalypse narrative frames existence as Us Vs. Them, the Saved Vs. the Zombie Horde that’s headed to hell quite soon.

Enter a little boy born in 1983 named Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, who died at age 11 from leukemia and prophesied the zombie apocalypse. The child, who was nearly canonized for his powers of prophecy and healing, said there would be:

global passports for the population, which will look like little grey plastic cards; in order to obtain this card, people will have to subject their right hand and forehead under machines which will mark them with the number (666). This was a warning that under no circumstances should anyone accept this number or mark, because this act will never be forgiven by God.

I have mentioned before that Christianity in its death throes is using Pedogate and the globalist conspiracy concept to use as a much needed adversary with which to strengthen itself. The leftist powers that be are not doing themselves any favors by calling their newest injectable enzymes “Luciferase”, despite their bioluminescent properties.

Only time will tell how the zombie trope will continue to act itself out in real life. Surely it’s a case of art imitating life at this point and not the other way around.

My little love Kiki died this afternoon at approximately 1pm. She was fifteen years old. After a dramatic episode as described in my previous post, we found a qualified pet euthanasia specialist called Peaceful Endings for Pets. The veterinarian was discreet, kind, and most importantly, extremely skilled. Kiki's death was peaceful and smooth thanks to the veterinarian's expertise. Nevertheless, it took 45 minutes and enough anesthetic to put down a large dog to put Kiki to sleep.

The part that tortures me is how badly Kiki wanted to live. She did not want to leave me, no matter how she retched whenever she tried to relax, how bloated and constipated she felt, or how bad her thirst grew, or how her throat burned and her teeth rotted from vomiting.

Kiki was never aloof. She acted more like a dog than a cat. We had a bond that was love at first sight from the first days at the shelter. It never waned. I poured every bit of frustrated childless person mother instinct into loving her and in return, I was her sun and moon. Due to the nature of my job, my husband has always arrived home from work before I do. She regularly sensed when I was coming home 20 minutes before I arrived, despite my erratic schedule, and yowled. When I got to the door, she was usually waiting. It was only in the last year she didn't constantly greet me at the door, and that was because she was resting or sleeping. She lived on my shoulder. "Kiki is the cat you wear" was my favorite joke.

The last three days have been unmitigated hell. The buildup to today's mercy killing was heart-rending. I vacillated many times. I did not want this creature to die, despite my deep faith that she would be received by spirit guides and helped by gods throughout her death journey.

I am incredibly grateful for the prayers sent to me. I don't think I would have any peace without them. This event made me realize why atheists kill themselves. When I adopted Kiki from the shelter fifteen years ago, I was atheist. I don't know that I would have survived this event as a nihilist atheist -- basically I would be alive only because I have people who would be upset by my death.

I didn't want to leave Kiki alone for a single moment in the last 3 days. I plopped her down on some towels tub-side when I bathed, sat her on her perch while I exercised, and ate pizza in bed brought to me by my husband because she had fallen asleep on my legs.

The episode with Welcome Waggin' gave me a poisonous, fleeting hope that it would be OK if I allowed Kiki to die more naturally. Late last night, I woke up tormented by a voice that said "Why micromanage her death so much? Can't you just call it off? In a less luxurious, less industrialized age, in-home pet euthanasia wouldn't be possible. She just wants to live." This voice haunted me several times.

Kiki arrived at the point of her illness where she could no longer sleep. She stared a thousand yard stare. When she started to drift off, her gag reflex would jerk her back to consciousness. She wanted to eat the food laid out for her but she would smell it and her gag reflex would activate. Nevertheless, there was still a small hope that I could heal her with herbs, maybe subsisting off of slippery elm and chicken broth, or at least this is what I told myself. It was only because of two photos I took of Kiki yesterday that I was able to resist the voice urging me to prolong her life. The pictures were worth a thousand words. Having taken literally thousands of pictures of her in her life, I saw the defeat and sadness in the last ones. I saw pain and suffering. I saw a being who was only hanging in there because she didn't want our time together to be over. I knew then that prolonging her life was selfish. I was fortunate to schedule her veterinary appointment in time to avoid even more suffering. This experienced has been a crucible: physically, emotionally, and spiritually agonizing. I was somewhere between Maiden and Matron when I adopted Kiki, but now I am fully the Crone; Gandalf the White.

My husband buried Kiki by one of the baby oaks in the late afternoon. This fall, I will start planting a garden of black flowers around Kiki's grave and the oak.

There will never be a day that will go by when I will not miss Kiki terribly. I look forward to my own death someday because I will finally get to be with her again. There are many questions I have for the gods, such as how she will reincarnate, and if she knows how much I have second guessed my decision and how sorry I am if it was the wrong choice. Thank you for your prayers and your words of encouragement for me for Kiki. They have been my salvation.

Kiki and I when we were both much younger and thinner.

Kiki and I when we were both a lot younger and thinner.

When my husband and I moved into my house three years ago after long stints of living with my parents between apartments, it felt amazing (still does!) to wake up under my own roof and to have my own yard. One of my many headstrong notions when I got here was to provide a feeding and watering station for the wide variety of northern Illinois animals who frequent my yard. Within weeks of the move, I was feeding and watering everyone from the raccoons evicted from our fixer-upper’s attic to sweat bees to the occasional fox on the move.

In exchange for the regular grub and drink, the animals provided us with plenty of visual entertainment, of course. Additionally, the feral cats unwittingly policed my raised garden beds of lettuce: I was the only person in the suburbs hauling garbage bags full of fresh lettuce out of my beds during nearly three months of temperate 2019. Elsewhere in the suburbs, rabbits ensured that didn’t happen. From the beginning, there was a sense of a relationship being built between me and the birds, squirrels, bugs, cats, raccoons, opossums, and skunks.

After only three years, the garden is barely established. It isn’t yet the sanctuary for animals (including human animals) I intend it to be. Nevertheless, when a skunk came into my yard to die three days ago, it wasn’t the first time an animal had sought shelter in my yard. Approximately five seconds after the garden shed was built, raccoons and skunks started living and hiding under it. My husband became concerned about this, but I was adamant that as long as I live here, let it be. The shed is the epicenter of the yard for animals at this point — it is where the animals eat and close to where they hide out storms and terrible weather.

For nearly a year, we’ve noticed one skunk who did a strange dance out by the feeding station, circling around, doing the skunk version of backflips. This was not mating behavior. The skunk, who dragged herself into my yard to die a few days ago, most likely had distemper. Distemper is similar to rabies. It is always fatal. The poor skunk wanted shelter and had dragged herself to the feeding station in a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

My husband was in the yard, so he picked up the twitching, flailing skunk with a shovel and put her out in some brush near the alley behind our house. At first, I wasn’t happy he did this, but when I realized distemper is spread through feces and bites, I thought it was for the best because the animals congregate in fairly close quarters near the shed, and I think nowadays most of us are acutely aware of social distancing when it comes to combatting viruses.

This is where I went wrong. We both knew the skunk was not going to live from looking at her, but we left her by the fence in hopes nature would take its course. Nature had slower plans. I kept checking the skunk throughout the day. Though her flailing slowed down, by the evening, she was still going, having dragged herself about six feet across the fence’s length in her agony during the long day. During the day, I called half a dozen different public institutions that one would think could have come and dispatched the skunk, ending her misery. Shockingly, even with the help of the Animal Help Now app, there wasn’t a damn person on government payroll willing to put down a skunk with a contagious virus. This begs the question why my tax dollars fund the Department of Natural Resources in the first place, and I’m mad enough still to write them a scathing review, but at any rate, my mistake was in not hiring a private service to euthanize the skunk the same day she wandered into my yard to die.

The issue was mostly about money. Because a skunk is considered a “nuisance” animal, and because skunks can spray, the charge was $150. In hindsight, I didn’t want to upset my husband by spending $150 during a time he has been laid off from his job, but then I realized my own hypocrisy at dropping $30 every few days on takeout in an effort to keep a new vegan restaurant in my area alive. I went to bed that night and slept fitfully and badly, hoping the skunk would die a natural death.

I got up the next morning and went outside. No such luck. She was still twitching and worse yet, raising her head. Distemper had made her into a skunk zombie. The look of it reminded me of the final stages of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, when the brain is gone and the body clings to life. I immediately called a private animal control service. A guy named Frank came out and ended the skunk’s life on the spot. I won’t say how, because people in the suburbs can often be complete asshats. It took two tries. The poor creature was finally off to the next phase of incarnation after a forty-hour ordeal. My only consolation was that I had surely shortened what could have been an even more obscenely extended death.

The thing that upsets me about my own behavior is that I kowtowed to financial and social pressure not to save an animal. A little over a year ago, my reclusive aunt died, and I braved social/physical/mental hell and high water to save her two cats, so I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to muster up my usual fire to dispatch a little skunk. Yes, it’s frustrating that government services failed me. That said, as I have gotten older, I have realized that most people in this culture shut down when it comes to dealing with animals. Our relationship with them is deeply fractured, and there’s nothing like a wounded animal wandering into one’s yard to remind us of that. Like many, I have had to start from scratch when it has come to how I think about animals, and ignoring the plight of the skunk for nearly forty hours was a nasty reminder of my old habits.

Compassion and bravery are traits we humans think we can pass on when it comes to animals. We are raised thinking they exist to serve us, entertain us, clothe us, and feed us, when the truth is closer to what Alice Walker said:

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”

Inasmuch as they were not created for me, I believe that all humans have an innate responsibility to act as animal stewards and protectors. Most of us shirk that responsibility our entire lives. Sadly, in order to get the job done for the skunk, I had to go against the grain. Just like the time when I rescued the cats, it quickly became abundantly clear that I was the only person willing to act like an adult where the skunk was concerned. Everyone else, including the state services which are supposed to do jobs like this, shrunk away in cowardice, leaving the skunk’s fate to chance. This was eerily similar to what happened when my aunt died, as nobody else considered going to her place to get the cats who would have frozen to death within a day or two if they weren’t attacked and killed by other animals.

Our relationships with non-human animals have been terrible since the day some dude decided to get a party together to spear a mammoth. Our despair and haplessness manifests itself in myriad ways. There are the sick, well-intentioned efforts of those who try to keep pets alive at all costs, making them go through hellish surgeries and veterinary treatments because they can’t bear to allow Fido or Fluffy to die a few years ahead of the ideal schedule. Worse than them are those who buy or adopt an animal and then abandon them because they are tired of the responsibility or because they birth human kids or because they move. Several of my neighborhood’s ferals started out as someone’s house cat. The primary reason I chose not to have children is because I didn’t want to end up with the horror of regretting it. When I adopted my cat, I knew I was signing on for no less than 16 - 23 years. The choice to abandon is just as bad with a non-human animal because neither baby nor puppy can understand what is going on or fend for themselves. And that’s just our relationship with pets…

Anyway, the poor skunk is gone now and bless her little soul as she makes her way through the planes, only to return again. I hope to see her again soon.