When I used Instagram more actively, I followed a hospice nurse named Hadley Vlahos. She shares stories about people she’s worked with who were in the process of dying. In 2022, she published a book called The In Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments, which collected some of these stories and also shared ones she had not yet told.
Hadley has also shared some interesting conceptualizations of grief and dying. She uses her box and ball analogy to describe the progression of grief after loss: the grief (a button in the box) is always there, to be triggered by the bouncing ball, but the box, representing your life, continues to expand, allowing the button to be triggered less and less, but it will always have a non-zero likelihood of being triggered. And she uses another analogy, inspired by a 99-year-old patient, to explain why some people might feel ready to die.
The analogy, explained in this video, is the Party Room. Imagine that there are two rooms: the Earth Room and the Afterlife Room. When you are born, all the people you interact with are in the Earth Room. As you grow up and progress through life, more and more people get added to the Earth Room, making it more and more of a lively party. Simultaneously, there are people moving from the Earth Room to the Afterlife Room. At first it’s just a couple people that you know, but then it’s more and more. Eventually you find that most of the important people that have made your life what it is have moved on to the Afterlife Room. You enjoy the company of grandkids, new friends, and others in the Earth Room, but you increasingly long to reunite with the people in the Afterlife Room and join their party. Thus you might get to a point where you simply feel ready to die, to be again in the company of the people who have joined the Afterlife Room.
When I first watched the video on Instagram, I made some interesting assumptions about what the analogy was. Initially I thought party analogy was about getting tired with a party and wanting to leave. That’s how I feel at most parties, after all: I might be able to enjoy myself a bit if I try, but eventually I get overstimulated and need to leave the room. But that’s not what the analogy ended up being, which made me realize that my views on death may be slightly unusual.
Hadley used the analogy to explain what many of her patients experience — and she, as someone with a Christian background living in Florida, probably works with a lot of patients who are also Christian and thus believe in a particular kind of afterlife. But she and other hospice nurses say that even many atheists, as well as people of other beliefs, start to experience spiritual or even paranormal phenomena when they are close to death. They start to interact with people who have already died, as if those people are welcoming them into an afterlife, and might be somehow clairvoyant or otherwise know something that others don’t. (For the skeptics: In my opinion, such paranormal phenomena may individually be hard to verify from a scientific perspective, but when many hospice nurses and others report similar things happening to a diversity of dying people, there is something going on, even if we do not or cannot know what.)
What I mean to say is, it seems that a lot of people, in the United States at least, have a particular viewpoint on death and afterlife, and I don’t share that perspective. My views, which I admit are not definite facts but rather feelings that I live upon, are informed by developmental psychology and my spiritual preference for pantheism and other religious beliefs that emphasize the sacredness of everything in the universe. When you are born, you do not have self. Your existence is indistinguishable for you from the world that you live in. You only learn the distinction between Self and Other in your early childhood development. You then further develop a distinctive sense of self through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Development never ends, although in our dysfunctional society, it might be arrested at some stage.
Bill Plotkin’s Developmental Wheel is a model for human development throughout the lifespan. Actually, he has two different models: one for the eco-soulcentric ideal, and one for the ego-centric reality that most people in the United States live. In the eco-soulcentric ideal, a person develops a healthy sense of self from childhood through adolescence, ultimately finding their soul, which briefly speaking is their unique purpose or ecological niche in life, and pursuing that mission for the rest of their adulthood and early elderhood. In the ego-centric version of the wheel, a person becomes arrested at an early adolescent stage, thus never achieving a healthy sense of self and being unable to discover and embody their soul. Read the article I linked and/or his book Nature and the Human Soul to learn more about his theory. A key thing to note is that his stages do not correspond to chronological age: most adults in the US are developmentally early adolescents due to their arrested development.
One thing that happens to a healthy person in the eco-soulcentric wheel is that as they enter early and then late elderhood, they start moving away from an existence centered on soul to one that embodies spirit. Spirit is universal connectedness, something that infants naturally embody, having not yet developed a self or encountered their soul. Healthy elders become more and more connected to the universe and less and less devoted to matters of self or soul, thus psychologically transitioning into death, at which their self fully ceases to exist.
Plotkin’s theory does not speculate about what happens afterwards. It could be nothing, it could be something; all are technically consistent with his developmental wheel. But I find it particularly poetic to believe that if babies are born full of spirit and empty of self, and elders become more and more connected to spirit and less and less concerned with self, that we are born from spirit, and we die to spirit. As in, we were once connected with the whole universe, and we will soon yet again be connected, but in this brief period of time we get to have a sense of separateness, which if we abuse will go rotten, but if we cultivate it with an understanding of our true, connected nature, our life will be meaningful.
I actually encountered Hadley’s analogy years before I read about Plotkin’s theory, but I use Plotkin’s ideas to specify in greater detail what I have long already felt in my intuition. I imagine death to be a release of Self into Other, thus dissolving all binaries (and ternaries and quaternaries) and reconnecting us to everything. I imagine it to feel good, even though I do not believe we’d have feelings at that point. But I long for connectedness now, so how amazing would it be to be connected to the whole universe? I suppose I’m already connected to the whole universe, but I still have that pesky thing called self that distracts me from that connectedness. Maybe it would feel good to die, to be finally free of self.
So, this is a problem. Hadley shared her analogy in part to assuage people’s fears when they hear old people saying that they feel ready to die. Wanting to leave the dwindling crowds of the Earth Room to join the Afterlife Room party sounds like a continued commitment to life, just of a different kind. Whereas my desire to leave the exhausting Earth Room party and release my self into the universe sounds kind of like the fantasy of a depressed person.
And indeed, it is. I have felt the desire to die, many times, chronically even. I have felt exhausted by the nonsensical, overstimulating, even terrifying Earth Room and fantasized being connected with the universe, even being connected to those who’ve already died (but not in a traditional afterlife sense: I don’t imagine interacting with these people, just being spiritually connected with their stardust). Depression has definitely shaped my beliefs about death and afterlife. But is that bad? Must I change my beliefs to something more life-sustaining?
I write this after having cried a lot for two days and felt more melancholy than usual. I got very upset watching a Chinese TV drama with my mother, as there were so many mean characters in that show, which reminded me that there are so many mean people in the world and so many terrible happenings in the world. So I’ve been feeling somewhat suicidal, but it’s not really a concern at this point. Suicidal thoughts do not mean that someone will die or even that they truly want to die. It’s just how my brain sometimes reacts to stress and meaninglessness.
But thinking about death more often has made me wonder if I might want to reshape my attitude towards death starting with my beliefs about it. It’s fine to believe in connectedness with spirit before birth and after death, but it is not fine, for me that is, to value that higher than the sacredness of soul — the unique value of myself. It can be hard to imagine sometimes, but I do have something to do in this world. I can be pretty driven by a sense of mission when I am not feeling lost for meaning. Whatever death will be like, I shall be ready when it’s time. But that time will come on its own. I don’t need to help it along.
Our society does not like to talk about death or grief in general. My family is the same: we haven’t talked much as a whole family about my grandfather who died in China in 2020, nor participated in any ritual to honor him. I actually had never attended a funeral until I played for one as a pianist a few months ago. So I think it is natural for a spiritual person like me to be curious about death and to wonder about what it would be like to witness it or experience it.
I feel that I must in my life at some point witness a birth and a death. Obviously, it would be a person inviting me to the event; I wouldn’t just pop into some random person’s sacred process. But it must be truly special to witness the miracle of both events and to hold in your heart that you have once been born, and you will at some point die. (We don’t usually talk of death as a miracle, but is it not equally so as birth? If you believe in an afterlife, it is your second birth; if not, it is the sunset of the soul, and are not sunsets beautiful and godly?)
I suppose if I were to truly respect death and the dying process, I would aspire to grow into a true elder, a healthy person who has earned their chance to embody spirit for the good of all. I am far from that. I am most likely at the late adolescence stage of eco-soulcentric development, although by societal necessity I also partake in activities of young adulthood. That is a bit farther along in development than most people in the United States, according to Plotkin, who are fixated at an unhealthy form of early adolescence. But soul development is not a race: everything comes in its natural, idiosyncratic rhythm, especially when a person is well-nurtured, or they figure out a way to be nurtured in an unhealthy society.
In the meantime, I shall cultivate the virtue of patience when hope is lacking. There is no need to rush dying. There is no need to rush deciding to die, either, and most of the time, after a wait, people find that they didn’t actually want to die after all. And there is no need to fantasize about the afterlife. It will come and show itself, and most likely, it will surprise us.