My Worst Nightmare

The role of fate, illness and death, can we escape it?

**This is a the start of a series that explores the role of fate, illness, and death, and whether we can escape those realities through spiritual transcendence. My quest to answer those questions was (and continues to be) only possible through the unwavering love, support, and safety of the relationship I share with my husband, Peter. He is my greatest ally, teacher, and mirror—showing me how I resist and/or heal myself into my full existence, as a soul. I’m eternally grateful, Peter, for your presence and strength in my life. But it is your willingness to use the lens of our life together—both the beauty and difficulty—to highlight how one goes about living their spiritual truth that touches my heart right now. As you said, this is my story, not your story, but I hope to honor us both in the telling. Thank you, darling, I love you.***

I wake up and sense Peter isn’t in bed. I keep my eyes closed and place my hand over the empty space. It’s still warm. I’ve grown accustomed to his frequent bathroom visits throughout the night since the prostrate cancer diagnosis and treatment years ago, but his absence feels different this time.

It could easily be the new house, I reassuringly tell myself, but I feel immediately wide awake and that concerns me. I lay still and hold my breath, like I’m listening for an intruder. I’d done a lot of that—holding my breath and listening—since I saw the foretelling of Peter’s death twelve years ago. I know exactly what letting go feels like in my body—like an emptiness that pulls everything dense out of awareness. It can feel incredibly euphoric or insight terror, depending on how attached I am to what’s leaving and how much I resist the unchanging stillness that remains.

Yes, in this moment, this situation feels scary, so I try to relax into my breath, surrender to the new mattress, and touch the pillowy comforter while I listen with every cell of my body—is he okay?

No, it’s here—danger—exactly as predicted.

But it wasn’t a prediction, or worry, or irrational fear when I saw the foretelling of Peter’s passing and how it was eerily tied to the completion of this new house. No, it felt like a definitive message that dropped into my awareness with a sense of surety I never could shake. Now it’s December 20, of 2022, and we moved into the house only a few weeks ago.

Those thoughts are front and center as I throw back the freshly washed white bedding and leap into the blanket of the darkness covering the house—it’s a new moon—leaving me with only a faint outline of Peter’s body leaning over the vanity as I enter the bathroom.

“Peter are you okay?”, I ask, trying to not sound like an alarmist.

“Something’s not right. Maybe I have food poisoning? I was on the toilet for a while.”, he says in a belabored tone.

I reach for the unfamiliar light switches on the wall, frantically cascading down all the pre-programmed buttons—bath high, bath low, vanity, shower—shifting the different modes of lighting onto the newly plastered grey walls like a disco.

“Ugh, what’s wrong with having simple light switches?”, I mutter to myself.

I return to the vanity setting and let the hue of light illuminate the room from under the floating cabinet. Now I can see that Peter isn’t just leaning against the vanity, but holding on to the vessel sink tightly with both hands.

“What’s going on?”, I ask curiously.

“I took my inhaler. I was having some trouble breathing.”, he says, as I circle my hand on his back and listen.

Yes, I notice his breathing is alarmingly shallow, like the air in the room. And nothing about him looks sturdy, his looseness reminds me of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

“What would you like to do?”, I ask him, trying to be more upbeat and sympathetic than alarmed.

The reality is—when I try to direct Peter, he immediately resists. So, I’ve learned to ask him questions and gently encourage him when I feel something intuitively. However, when I reach around, lower my head, and squint to look into his eyes, I realize this is not one of those instances. There’s an eerily similar incoming vacancy I recognize from when he had a stroke not long after we were married.

“Are you feeling like you can move to the bed?”, I urgently ask, as I place my arm around his waist and try to direct his tall unsteady body with my own movement and leading words.

He doesn’t answer, but instead starts to shake with determination to stay upright. He holds on more tightly, less to me than the sink, maybe knowing its solidness was more dependable than my short frame and compromising constitution. My gut tells me he’s about to fall, so I lean into his body more fully, but he’s starting to topple when things move into slow motion; his body filling with the weight of unconsciousness, my desperate wanting to break his fall, and hearing the thud of his head against the newly grouted decorative tile on the floor.

“Peter! Peter!”, my words come with a justifiable sense of alarm now.

I drop to my knees, feel the coldness of the tile on my skin, and hunch over his body, lying now in a lose fetal position. His stoic body is too still for my liking and his head precariously close to the corner of the wall, so I put my ear to his face and touch his neck, not really sure what I’m looking for outside of any sign of life.

Oh my God; I can’t see or hear his breathing!

I’d spent the last two decades studying his breathing, becoming intimate with his breath. I was on high alert when his inhalation or exhalation strayed from his normal. He was an asthmatic with reduced lung capacity, from childhood. He was still an occasional wheezer and regular shallow breather, but this looked like nothing I’d seen before; he’s reaching outward for breath and then not breathing at all. He suddenly looks ashen to me, like he’s blending into the white tile. I sense a growing urgency to call 911, but have no idea where my phone is in this new house.

Fucking. New. House.

I’d gone to see one of my healing colleagues because I had a growing wall of resistance when it came to building this house. When I reached through that fog of resistance that day, messages were conveyed, without the necessity of words. I was shown the exact design of the center nave, as it stood now in the completed house, with a glass roof—to let the light in, they said. And the vision came with an edict—let him build the house. It’s his destiny, your destiny.

With Peter now lying on the floor, seemingly unconscious, it feels more like fate than destiny. I can feel him slipping away.

“Peter! Peter, can you hear me!? I need you to stay with me!”, I shriek.

He reacts by involuntarily convulsing on the floor. His gut retracts and his upper body starts to retch, like he is trying to expel something inhospitable. From the faintness of the light, I can’t tell if he’s throwing up the stew from dinner, or wine, or blood, but the pool of liquid is growing too quickly, that I know. His head and shoulders are soon surrounded by a dark halo. I want to call 911, but I know I don’t dare leave his side until his body has surrendered everything. I have no choice. I position my hands behind his head and shoulders, rolling him slightly forward as I watch him empty himself with a growing sense of helplessness.

And then, he goes perfectly still again, and I know—I can no longer wait for help, but I have no idea where either of our phones are right now. Over the last few weeks, neither Peter nor I had the time to establish any new rhythms or routines for ourselves. We’d been unpacking, organizing, and going to bed each night exhausted—not coming up with emergency preparedness plans.

I silently scold myself; knowing this was a very distinct possibility.

I’d always hoped I’d done enough to change Peter’s fate, but now I was wondering if I had been naïve by not telling him what was communicated on the healing table that day. As the planning and construction of the house progressed, I thought about telling him a thousand times over, but our unfolding life together intimated it might have been more harmful than helpful.

When I met Peter, he was a devoted atheist and I was a teetering agnostic. When I veered into spiritual territory and my relationship with healing and the unseen world surprisingly captured my curiosity, he wasn’t vaguely interested. He scoffed at anything he couldn’t understand with his rational mind, like any good intellectual. I was still attempting to unfurl that tendency in myself, so I understood the hold of the ego that only wants us to honor the certainty of what we think we know. How was I ever going to explain that tall energetic beings—who appeared as trees, symbolically representing the connection of earth and heaven—came to me while I was on a massage table and conveyed the fate of his impending death?

The answer—I couldn’t. Not without making the spirit world even more untrustworthy in Peter’s mind. No, I determined I had to find a way to save Peter, but that thinking started long before this unwelcome and foreboding look into the future.

In fact, the idea that I was on this planet to change, or fix, or save others was already part of my natural make-up when I met Peter, but it became an object of fixation when he had the stroke not long after we were married. Though it had been over fourteen years since that incident occurred, I still remembered how serious things were when we arrived at the emergency room that night. Peter was unable to talk or get out the car on his own volition. The team moved quickly, explaining early invention is key to recovery. (Like most things in life.) In the twenty-four hours that followed, Peter slowly came back online and the doctors explained there weren’t any obvious indications of what caused Peter’s brain to attack him. I wasn’t a medical doctor, but I suspected Peter’s lack of forthrightness about his lifestyle might have been the culprit.

At the time, I felt Peter was amazing, an initiator of great endeavors, and loyal as the day is long, if you are in his inner circle. But he also worked too hard, moved faster than most, forced things into existence too often, and drank more than I would have liked, maybe like many male CEOs of his era. He didn’t divulge any of his lifestyle choices to his care team, nor did I say anything, but when the doctor asked Peter about his history of drinking and he was disingenuous in his answer, I tried to be diplomatic.

“Peter, I think you have more than one or two drinks a day.”, I said soberly, looking at the doctor, hoping my intimation would help avoid further complications.

Peter said nothing, but looked at me like I’d tattled on him. The doctor’s acknowledgment, however, outweighed my discomfort that he might be annoyed with me.

“Well, let’s put him on a sugar water drip. It’s just precautionary and can’t hurt. It helps with detox and lessons the chances of the body going into shock from withdrawal.”, the doctor said matter-of-factly.

Maybe that was the first time I admitted to myself that I could no longer be silent about Peter’s lifestyle. I’d looked the other way, mostly because he wasn’t always interested in hearing my opinions, especially if they impeded his freedom to live life on his terms. Plus, being the voice of moral high ground quickly sucks the joy out of any relationship. But the somber vision of Peter leaning back in his hospital bed—ashen and confused at just sixty-years old—was the motivation I needed. I went home that evening and poured every bottle of alcohol down the sink, which felt like the only loving action in my immediate control. When I defiantly told Peter what I did the next morning, he appeared undazed.

“Fine, I’ll give up martinis, but I’ll probably still drink beer and wine”, he said flatly, “…let’s give it six months and see how it goes.”

A few weeks later Peter was showing all the signs of someone who’d reclaimed his invincibility. He resumed a busy work and travel schedule. I understood the pressure of performance and achievement, as I was still unraveling the motivations behind those tendencies in myself. I’d tried numerous self-help interventions, but they just seemed to shuffle my dysfunction around. After Peter and I married, I’d left a successful career in the corporate world to research how to create more sustainable change in my own life. It was the unexpected answers that pulled me in the direction of the healing arts. After his stroke, I naively thought being a healthy model of change would inspire Peter. I even introduced him to meditation, sharing my secret transcendental mantra with him, hoping self-awareness and slowing down could be something he might embrace, once he tried it. Over the next six months, the shifts were subtle, but welcome—he was a tiny bit more vulnerable with his feelings, and more curious in our conversations, and more thoughtful about my needs in ways that sometimes surprised me.

It was during this time we started talking about his retirement. He’s thirteen years older than me, so we weaved together a plan that included both of our dreams. We had a modest second home on an island north of Seattle. It was our happy place, where the busyness of life slowed down and we enjoyed the seclusion of the woods along with each other’s company. This is where we both enjoyed simple pleasures; a strong cup of coffee in the morning, listening to NPR, reading books in silence, taking a walk, or sharing a good meal with friends or neighbors who came to visit. I never envisioned I’d ever give up my healing work, so we wrapped in a plan for a healing center, too.

Also, we both love to travel, so we talked about adventures we could take post-retirement. When I was in my early thirties, a psychic once saw a vision of me twirling a globe of the world and asking my partner, “…where should be go next?” In my mind, Peter was that person—I was sure of it. We traveled so well together, whether it was in the US or internationally. We’d already enjoyed England together, my mother country, and France, where Peter proposed at the foot of a bridge that gracefully arched over the Seine River.

The romantic clarity of our shared vision, however, slowly started to unravel once Peter hit the six-month anniversary of his stroke. His work schedule intensified, beer and wine made an unwelcome reappearance, and meditation became something of the past. Yet, it was the promise of Peter’s retirement, our simple life on the island, and my deep dive into the world of metaphysics that offered me hope, especially when it felt like Peter was flying too close to the sun.

Of course, there were earnest reasons for wanting Peter to stick around, long before the stroke or the prophecy—I love him, adoringly so, regardless of his idiosyncrasies. In the beginning, I fell in love with everything that pointed to who I was not, like most opposites that attract. He’s a big-thinking visionary, if you give him the space to lead. He’s wise and detached, not often mired by other people’s emotions or opinions. He can be bold, confident, and take risks, especially if the target aligns with his values. Sure, he offers the façade of masculinity that’s indicative of someone who was born and raised in the 50s, but beneath it all, I could see he was a sensitive soul. Even from the beginning, I could see we were meant to round each other out and learn from each other. Equally important, Peter felt like a protector, something I’d been looking for in a partner for most of my adult life. But I also admired how Peter stayed committed to our relationship, even as I became a different version of the woman he once married.

With each healing modality I explored—in fact, I’d become a different, on-going iteration of myself. I started to see, through my own direct experiences with the divine, that it’s our beliefs and patterns of thought born from fear that block our ability to know ourselves, truly. Ultimately, it was the slow unraveling of those fears that gave me access to the world of energy healing, intuition, and miracles, which was the biggest leap—not just for Peter, but also for my own ego and left-brain constitution. And yet, as my experiences with healing and spiritual phenomena veered into unordinary territory, my faith developed and I became convinced there was something in me that was ungraspable through the lens of the ego. This growing awareness seemed to somehow make Peter afraid of losing me to the spirit world, to my faith, to God. It was somewhere in the midst all of this exploration and realization that the simplicity of our perfect plan to retire to the island changed considerably.

The catalyst for the change hinged on our decision to purchase a ten-acre plot of land down the road from our existing place on the island. It would hold our dream house, along with the healing center, we both agreed. Peter would design the main house, which would feel like a church, with a tall nave and huge front door—to speak to my increasingly spiritual sensibilities—and the living areas would extend to the left and right of the nave, like the wings of a bird, to speak to Peter’s need for freedom and autonomy. Building this house became Peter’s obsession, which is why I went to see one of my healing colleagues—to clear my resistance to our shared destiny, to get my ego out of the way—not to see into the potential of a future where Peter doesn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

And yet, from the moment I peered into the unwelcome prophecy, building the house became a dance of mixed loyalties, ripe with conflict. In some instances, time was a cruel antagonist offering delays and obstacles that slowed the creation of our shared vision. But more often, time was the hero of the journey, offering me an opportunity to explore the role of fate, illness, and death—and whether healing and listening for inner guidance was enough to change someone’s fortune. After all, why would an all-loving source, some call God, manifest things so seemingly cruel into our existence, if not to overcome them, and turn them into something that is more loving, and sacred, and true.

Answering those types of questions would require an even deeper inward plunge into spiritual metaphysics, ultimately leading me to read, study or train extensively, or receive services from experts in their fields—intuitives, mediums, medical energy medicine practitioners, and even trance channelers who conveyed healing messages that often felt otherworldly. It was during this time that I had a number of life-alternating experiences, including an unexpected communion with the man historically known as Jesus, a period of awakening where my personal identity was replaced by pure adulterated awareness and bliss, and an instance when our entire island home was consumed by light in the middle of the night after committing to a particular spiritual text called A Course in Miracles.

And yet, the earnestness of my quest to understand my own sense of freedom seem to create a type of insecurity in my relationship with Peter. He had a nightmare I left him for Jesus, and I started to question if I’d confused romantic love with the purity of God’s love. Peter became more focused on material security, and I became overly compromising about what I was learning through the Course. By the time the pandemic hit, I’d closed my healing practice, joined Peter in his material endeavors—including buying a new business and renovating houses—and abandoned the inward pull of my own spiritual journey. Somehow, I determined it was more important that Peter leave the physical world feeling fulfilled and happy, even though I had a growing anxiety I might die before realizing those things for myself. In fact, I started to get sick myself—recurring bouts of vertigo, diverticulitis, and skin cancer—leaving me wondering if I’d forgotten how to apply the lessons of my spiritual journey to the circumstances of my own life.

With Peter’s body now deathly still on the bathroom floor, I couldn’t help but wonder if I stopped short of my most important lesson, coming to terms with the reality of physical death and living into the truth of our spiritual immortality.

Looking into the eyes of my worst fear—being all by myself, without Peter, and loosing the security of the life we’d created together, left me with the obvious question—was I prepared to go it alone?

I already knew the answer, as I whimpered into Peter’s ear, knowing perfectly well I was not going to get a response, “Darling, I’m going to find my phone so I can call 911. I’ll be right back, okay?”

I stand up and lunge for the bedroom lights, this time hitting only one button and flooding the room with more light than you want in the middle of the night, startling me into focus. I look to our side tables, wheels of petrified wood, looking for my phone. I don’t see it, but I grab my glasses and put them on as I run into the living room. I let my eyes dart to every flat space, but my phone is nowhere obvious. I reach my hands into the blankets that cover the new couches, like an addict looking for money. As I move through the center nave of the house, I reach darkness again, so I hit another set of lights and move into the kitchen. And there, on the overly large unfinished kitchen island, is my phone. I grab it and look at the time. It’s almost midnight, a time when we are meant to be sleeping not having waking nightmares.

I dial 911 and run back to Peter as the operator picks up. She asks her first question, just as Peter is coming back into consciousness with a groan.

“What happened?”, Peter mumbles.

I’m not sure what Peter remembers, but the details are still alive and alert in my body, like an old, unwelcome visitor who’s been waiting to greet me since the beginning of time.

“You fell and were throwing up.”, I convey to both the 911 Operator and Peter, simultaneously.

“Help me stand up.”, Peter says with the determination that only he could muster, even in a situation like this.

“No, I’m not strong enough to carry the weight of your body, if you fall again.”, I quip, hoping the woman on the other end of the phone supports my decision.

She does.

“Tell him to stay put. We’ve dispatched the fire department and the EMTs—they’re on their way.”, the dispatcher speaks with a directness I can’t always muster with Peter.

I’m feeling a huge wave of gratitude for the woman on the phone, so I plea for her to stay to provide moral support, more than anything. It’s okay to ask for help, I know that now. I’m hoping she’ll be capable of helping me wrangle Peter into surrender until medical help arrives.

I dotingly place Peter’s head on a clean towel, remove a fluffy black robe from a hook, and drape it over his almost naked body, while I reiterate my major concern out loud—time is of the essence here—I’m not sure how Peter will do without real medical care. It’s clear, things are still serious. Our house is over a mile into the woods, sits at the edge of a cliff overlooking the water, and is a twenty-five-minute drive from town. What once felt like a gift, now feels like a liability.

The whole thing starts to feel like a bad dream, a nightmare I can’t escape. I want the reassuring voice of an emergency operator to lore me into a different reality—the one where Peter lives—and I hope, in that moment, that the healing I experienced, the wisdom I’d once embodied and somehow forgot, and the faith I’d developed in the unseen world might allow that to happen.