Everyone you know is going to die.

I know that’s not the sort of sentence you’re supposed to open an article with. It’s impolite. Morbid. Uncomfortable. Best saved for funerals, philosophy lectures, or late-night spirals when the wine’s gone warm, and the mind has wandered somewhere it shouldn’t.

But it’s also true.

And truth has a funny way of refusing to stay buried.

Most of us live as though death is a technical fault. An unfortunate interruption to an otherwise open-ended plan. Something that happens to other families, at inconvenient times, preferably far away. We avoid it linguistically, psychologically, and culturally. We euphemise it. We sanitise it. We push it to the edges of consciousness and hope it stays there.

It doesn’t.

When someone close to us dies — a parent, a partner, a sibling — the illusion shatters. Not gently either. Brutally. And in that shattering, something else often happens, whether we like it or not: we’re forced to meet ourselves.

That was certainly the case for me.

Christmas Day

The last time I saw my mum alive was Christmas Day, 2013.

We actually had a nice day. That alone made it notable. Alcohol had dominated our family dynamic for as long as I could remember, and Christmas tended to amplify whatever dysfunction was already present. This year, though, it was calm enough. Pleasant, even.

At the time, I was still a high-functioning alcoholic — a habit I’d inherited honestly. Mum had drunk my whole life. By then, she was in her early seventies, living with advanced COPD and recovering from a double mastectomy the year before. Frail, yes. Dying? Not obviously.

When it was time to leave, I hugged her. I might even have kissed her on the cheek, which was a rare intimacy between us. There was no dramatic sense of finality. No ominous knowing. Just a goodbye.

We never imagine that this goodbye might be the last, do we?

“I’ll Go to the Meeting”

On Monday, January 6th, I was due back at work.

I’d spent the holidays planning a new creative agency — a solo venture that would eventually teach me many lessons, alongside my third nervous breakdown. I was about to leave for a meeting when my older brother called.

He struggled to speak through the sobbing. Eventually, the words came.

“Martin… our mum’s dead.”

I paused. Briefly.

Then I said I’d go to the meeting and drive to the house afterwards.

I put the phone down, packed my bag, and carried on as though nothing had happened.

Avoidance is a remarkable thing. How quickly the mind mobilises when faced with something it cannot bear to feel. Neurotic organisation fine-tuned.

As I loaded the car, I ran into my neighbour. She asked how I was, and I collapsed. Tears everywhere. The truth spilt out of me before I could stop it. She gently suggested I might want to go to my family instead.

Wowsers. Without her, I would have driven six hours round-trip to avoid my own grief and my suffering family — all in service of a pointless meeting. Thanks.

The Body

My dad answered the door in his pyjamas and collapsed into my arms. He couldn’t speak.

I asked when the ambulance had taken her body.

It hadn’t.

Only the family doctor had been. Mum was still in her chair in the back room.

“What am I going to do, Martin?” my dad pleaded.

I sent him upstairs for a shower, took a breath, and walked in alone.

Seeing a dead body is strange. Especially when it belongs to someone whose expressions you know intimately. She looked like herself, and not like herself at all. It didn’t feel as though she’d ended. More that she wasn’t there anymore.

Her body rested peacefully in a black leather La-Z-Boy recliner. Her skin had taken on a greenish-yellow hue. Her eyes were closed, sunken deep into dark hollows. I remember being oddly grateful for that and not having to meet the emptiness behind them.

I approached her and whispered: “Oh, Mum.”

I kissed her cold forehead.

Then I noticed something that made me laugh through the tears: she’d died holding a packet of cigarettes.

I gently prised them from her hand. I’m not entirely sure why. Shame, perhaps. Or habit. Or love in its most confused form.

We spent hours in that room later — my brother, my dad, and me. Coffee. Stories. Laughter. Weed rolled far thicker than necessary. She was quiet, obviously, but it was… nice.

And then we left so the undertaker could do his work.

Regret

People grieve for many reasons.

Some miss the deceased so intensely that the absence feels unbearable. That wasn’t my primary wound.

Mine was regret.

I had kept my mum at arm’s length for years for valid reasons, I told myself. She was an alcoholic. Our relationship was abusive and dysfunctional. Boundaries were necessary.

What I lacked was emotional intelligence. Compassion. Forgiveness. Any real capacity to hold complexity.

I had never said “I love you” enough.

I had never said “thank you for bringing me into this world and doing your best.”

I had never asked her what drove her to self-destruct.

I hadn’t owned my part in our dynamic — my cruelty, my avoidance, my righteousness.

And then we ran out of time.

All the love I had for her suddenly had nowhere to go.

That’s a particular kind of hell.

In the weeks and months that followed, I held it together on the surface. Planned the funeral. Stayed busy. Organised. Functional.

Underneath, I was coming apart.

Relationships imploded. Business partnerships collapsed. Substances multiplied. I drank heavily, used cocaine recklessly, and burned through whatever slivers of integrity I still had. And when confronted with my own dishonesty, I did what emotionally undeveloped people often do: I lied and created more drama.

I drank a bottle of neat gin. Put my head through a window. sliced myself with a kitchen knife.

It was one of the lowest points of my life. And, perversely, one of the most important. Because eventually, I could no longer avoid the obvious truth:

I was the common denominator.

That realisation led me into therapy for the first time. Properly. Not to be fixed, but to be seen.

I had no idea then that this collapse — catalysed by my mum’s death — was the beginning of an entirely different life.

Death as Teacher

We don’t like to talk about death. Western culture treats it as a failure, a tragedy, an aberration.

It isn’t.

It’s the most reliable constant we have.

When we refuse to acknowledge that, death doesn’t disappear; it just ambushes us. And the ambush is psychologically expensive. Grief compounds. Regret festers. Bodies and minds suffer under the weight of what was never said.

My mum’s death didn’t just hurt. It revealed.

It showed me the cost of avoidance, of emotional illiteracy, of postponing truth until it’s too late. It forced me to confront the consequences of living as though time were infinite.

Death, it turns out, is an unforgiving but precise teacher.

Five Years Later

Five years after my mum died, during a conscious connected breathwork session in Bali, I met her again.

Make of that what you will.

I was in a yoga shala with fewer than ten people. This wasn’t my first breathwork experience, but the release that day remains one of the most powerful I’ve ever known. I sobbed without restraint; no shame, no self-consciousness, no narrative.

Before she appeared, I came face to face with what I can only describe as my Higher Self — symmetrical, whole, unmistakable. And then she was there.

She smiled at me.

I was overwhelmed with joy.

“Mum,” I said, “I’m writing. I’m writing about things that really matter.”

Then the familiar ache surfaced. The guilt.

“But I’m writing about you,” I said. “About your sickness. About how that created my sickness. I’m sorry.”

She smiled the warmest smile. Effortlessly, she said:

“Tell the truth that must be told, Martin.
Tell the truth that must be told …”

And then she dissolved.

I broke open completely. All the grief I’d been carrying in my lungs finally had permission to move.

Whether you believe I communed with the spirit of my dead mum is largely irrelevant. What matters is that I received a clear message about truth. And with it, the courage to live and speak more honestly than I ever had before.

The Aftermath

Since then, everything’s changed.

Not overnight. Not neatly. But fundamentally.

My mum’s death brutalised me into becoming someone new. Not better. Not enlightened. Just more real and a whole lot more healed.

I learned — too late for her, but not for me — that unresolved love is a heavy thing to carry. That avoidance doesn’t spare us pain; it compounds it. And that death, when faced directly, has an uncanny way of clarifying what actually matters.

Everyone you know is going to die.

Including you.

If that thought frightens you, it might be worth asking why. And if it awakens something — be that urgency, tenderness, or truth — then perhaps it’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do.

Death isn’t the enemy.

It’s the reminder.

If you’re still here, thank you for reading. This is the truth that needed telling.

A Dead Mum’s Message was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s like creating a new identity for yourself. Life will never be the same, so you can’t rely only on your old personality — you step into a new role and somehow merge the two.

I’ve been called a ‘Graphic Designer’ for the last 10 years. I became a mom recently, and I’m suddenly referred to as a ‘new mom’, as if that’s my only identity now. But I want to be more.

Somewhere in the last few years, I also stopped feeling as passionate about design as I once did. Not in a dramatic way — more like a slow fading. I kept looking for fulfilment in different corners of my life, hoping something would light me up the way it used to.

And through pregnancy, childbirth, and now almost a year postpartum, one thought stayed consistent: Why didn’t anyone warn me about this?

I had no idea what pregnancy would feel like — the hormonal shifts, sleepless nights, bodily changes, and everything else. And I kept thinking: I’m going to tell other women, whenever they plan to have a baby, what to expect.

I know we can never be fully prepared to be a mom, but we can at least be aware of what’s coming. Motherhood is glamourised as the happiest phase of your life — yes, it is — but it’s also been the most challenging and difficult one for me so far.

And then it hit me. IT’S TIME.

A little backstory: I did an online certification course a few years back (in the pursuit of finding fulfilment) and started calling myself a Mindset coach. I even took two sessions and I loved them. But the only problem was that I had no niche. So I couldn’t reach people the way I wanted to. My content didn’t speak to any particular audience, but I kept writing anyway.

What got to me was that after two years of being inactive on Medium, my articles were still performing. And I thought: it’s time to use this and take the next step.

I am now pursuing (you can call me crazy) a Postgraduate diploma in Counselling and two practitioner certifications at the same time, with an almost 11-month-old baby. I’ve never been more exhausted, but I’ve also never been this excited and happy.

Because motherhood didn’t just change my routine. It changed my lens. It made me realize what I care about, what I want to talk about, and the kind of support I wish women had.

I finally found my niche.

I finally found fulfilment.

And if you’re a woman who feels like you’ve disappeared inside a new role — if you’ve been told, directly or indirectly, that the “old you” no longer matters — I want you to know this:

You’re allowed to rebuild.

You’re allowed to want more.

You’re allowed to come back to yourself — slowly, imperfectly, honestly.

This is me coming back.

One article at a time.

Rebuilding Myself After Having a Baby was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This piece of art is acrylic on canvas and in inspired by Fall; a season defined by the art of letting go. I painted it during one of the most challenging phases of my life, my own journey of letting go.

I bought this canvas in early 2024, shortly after relocating to Atlanta for work. It was a monumental time in my life, my first time living entirely in my own space. Having spent years in hostels during college and four years in PGs while working in Mumbai, this apartment was the culmination of a long-held dream. It was a space I chose for myself, and for the year before I moved in with my partner, it became my sanctuary, a place where I learned to embrace my own life choices and beliefs.

The year 2024 was both challenging and transformative. I had graduated from SCAD in 2023 with a Master’s in Design Management, and after a year of interning and job hunting, I finally found a role with a team that truly cared about people and the impact of their work. I was working from home, and though I didn’t have a car, I lived in an area where I could easily walk to explore or reach MARTA. As I settled into my new life, I reflected on the distance that had grown between me and my friends since I began my journey to the U.S. I realized I had been giving too much of myself to others, and it was time to redirect that energy into building a space and a life that reflected my own emotions. To be honest, that was difficult; I realized I had never really prioritized myself enough before.

I began this painting in late summer on my patio. As I sat before the blank canvas, the trees nearby were just beginning to turn, their colors shifting in the morning light. I spent those weeks contemplating the aspirations that brought me to the U.S., the dependencies I needed to outgrow, the self-confidence I needed to rebuild, and a renewed hope for faith and love.

Creating this piece became a part of my daily rituals. I worked on it every evening after my 9-to-6 and throughout my weekend mornings. It was an intensely emotional process; I cried, I smiled, and I felt everything in between. Every stroke and every color merging on the canvas reflects both the struggles and the beauty I experienced throughout the process. Each blend taught me something new about life and myself. Sometimes I listened to podcasts or simple background music, but the natural songs of the birds was a constant companion.

My piece, The Fall, is about the art of letting go. Just as vibrant leaves fall, releasing their only support to bloom anew, I learned to release the struggles and fears I had carried since childhood. This painting captures my journey of conquering those fears, finding the confidence to embrace the present, and learning to believe in myself.

The Fall is more than just art; it is a testament to survival, the victory of love over fear, and a quiet, enduring reflection of my faith.

The Fall - My Journey of Letting Go was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I write because I spend a lot of time alone.

Since the beginning of 2020, I’d estimate that around 80–90% of my time has been spent alone.

That’s a lot of time to think.

To worry.

To go deep.

And most importantly, to write.

Writing takes on many forms: journaling, emails, blogs, videos, short-films.

For me, it’s the easiest way to clarify my thoughts.

If I’m feeling bad, I’ll write about why.

If I’m feeling anxious, I’ll write out everything I’m anxious about.

Most of my days are spent writing words like this, which is why words come out so easily.

And often when you’re writing a lot, you start to come up with more creative means of processing and sharing those thoughts. For me, filmmaking has become that outlet.

How I became an addict.

Ever since I felt this pop in my inner-groin area while running around our track in college all the way out in Meadville, PA (Allegheny), I’d learned to hate running.

It hurt, so of course I hated it.

The rewards were practically non-existent beyond pain.

So I avoided it.

It wasn’t until the last few years, while living abroad in Japan and later Turkey, that I realized… “running is all I got, dammit!”

For my mental health.

My sanity.

Everything.

Here’s how I stopped hating it, and slowly became addicted to it:

1. I made it easy.

I kept my running shoes at the door. Lowered the barrier to starting.

(I think other writers like James Clear have written/spoken about this.)

2. I created a routine.

I paired runs with coffee spots that I wanted to check out. That gave me something to look forward to.

3. I became consistent.

Even a quarter-mile would count. Consistency beat intensity every time.

That’s how resistance turned into ritual.

ps video I filmed a while back that explore my relationship with running:

Writing through fraud, trauma, death, all that.

But running and writing only get you so far.

I still wrestle with the same things most people do:

• Feeling like a fraud.
• Living with childhood trauma.
• The fact that death is coming, whether we (I) like it or not.

Most of my work follows the same format:

→ Here’s what I’m dealing with

→ Here’s what I went through

→ Here’s something you can learn from that

That’s it.

It’s how I process fraud.

It’s how I write through trauma.

It’s how I try (begrudgingly) to face death.

Why I keep doing it.

I run because it’s healthy. Because it keeps me in the moment.

I write because it’s how I make sense of being alive.

Whether I’m running, writing, or making films, I’m trying to do the same thing: stay alive, stay sane, and maybe leave behind something useful.

TLDR:

You don’t need to run.

You don’t need to write.

But you do need something.

A ritual.

Something that helps you wrestle with the reality that life is short and we don’t know when we’ll go.

That’s what writing and running have been for me for so, so many years: true sanity-savers.

Experiment, try things, and let those things save you.

On writing, running, and facing death. was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was certainly not my most pressing issue, nor do I think I particularly appreciated it at the time. But there is something to admire there: They saw a nightmare of a problem and realized they couldn’t really do much, but they did what they could. Let’s call it the Cancer Neighbor’s Rule: If you encounter someone with cancer — especially a family dealing with the cancer of a child — you see what you can do to help.

At the very least, you try not to make things worse.

For instance, if you encountered a family with an immigration status in question and a pre-schooler suffering from cancer, there would be a range of helpful options, from offering them a cold drink to helping them with paperwork.

You could check with their doctor to see what the kid needs. Is it even possible to safely disrupt their care? You could wait more than three days before shipping everyone off, just so they could see what options are available.

You might even just slide the whole thing off your desk and give them a break. That is, of course, a bit unbelievable. I once read a book where a character asked for a favor from a bureaucrat. “Be human,” she asked. “I’m not human, I’m a government official” came the response, and that seems the more likely response. But still, you can at least give a family a little bit of time before turning their life upside down. Because, I’m telling you, when you have a kid with cancer, your life is already upside down.

Putting them on a plane to Honduras with little notice and no access to doctors or medicine would not be considered helpful.

The Bare Minimum

You know, I’ve tried very hard not to weaponize Colin’s death. I mean, lord, it’s been more than five years since he died — he was 5 at the time — and I don’t want to be someone who spends their time expecting the world to take care of me because he died and my wife and kids and me went through hell. I haven’t had it in me so form a charity or lobby politicians for more money for childhood cancer research. Mostly I’m tired and find it kind of hard enough to blog sporadically about how I’m doing. I don’t expect to find a way to make Colin’s death help make the world a better place. It was senseless and depressing and just took so much energy.

But then I read the story this weekend about the families deported from Louisiana to Honduras with little notice. Despite the fact that the children were U.S. citizens. Despite the fact that the fathers seem to have objected.

Despite the fact that one of them had cancer and wasn’t given a chance to consult a doctor or get medication or anything.

And I thought about that a while and couldn’t help but think that maybe it couldn’t hurt to throw something out there into the world. Maybe this needs to be stated clearly. Because, when it comes down to it, all the family of a child with cancer wants is for you to not make their lives harder. This is not about buying them a car or fixing them a special meal. This is not about running errands for them or making sure their mail doesn’t pile up while they’re out. It’s not about going out of your way. It’s simple: Don’t make their lives harder.

I don’t know the status of the two mothers who were deported with their US citizen children. I don’t know if they had overstayed visas or if they had engaged in some kind of criminal activity or if they had arrived recently or if they had been repeatedly warned that their time in the U.S. was almost up. I do know that, if your child is suffering from cancer, you tune a lot of the world out. You might think that something as stupid as immigration status just has to wait, because you’re busy making sure your kid takes all the medication, which is a job unto itself. You have to make sure your kid shows up to medical appointments and then waits for hours and hours in boring hallways and waiting rooms while you hope the battery on your phone doesn’t die, because the videos you’re watching is all that stands between you and a screaming fit. And you often can’t afford a screaming fit with a child that sick. If you’re dealing with a health care service, you spend a lot of time just hoping people show up when they say they will.

Honestly, I’m impressed they had it in them to go to the immigration status appointment.

I don’t know. I live in Germany and did not have German citizenship during the whole time Colin was sick. I can’t really imagine how I would have reacted if Germany had tried to extradite me in the middle of all that. It’s kind of easy to see me just giving up and allowing myself to be sent away. But I’m also pretty sure I wouldn’t have had the time to worry about getting to the meetings and taking care of the paperwork, because if I wasn’t taking care of Colin at the hospital or running him to the hospital or taking care of some medical errand, I still had two other children to worry about.

I probably would have assumed that the immigration officials had better things to do than separate a dying child from one of their parents. I probably would have assumed that no one would stick a deathly ill child on an international fight without a support team.

That said, I don’t know how sick this child is, but stage four cancer can’t be good. Towards the end, my wife wondered if we should pack Colin up with a nurse and go to an amusement park so he could have one last blast as a kid. I looked at the feeding bags he would need (he couldn’t eat orally at the end), and the breathing machine we would have to pack and the medicines we would need and the logistics of getting it into the car and back and I almost wilted away. The trip never happened. I regret it didn’t. I’m so happy we didn’t try it. Things don’t make sense when you’re watching your child die.

But maybe this child is doing better than that. Lord know though, I wouldn’t assume that. I wonder what the case officer saw? I would have gotten the kid a book and a toy and found a way to keep the kid at home. But that’s me.

I don’t think people taking care of dying children necessarily have the ability to make the best decisions. I lost something like 20 pounds while Colin was sick and told the therapist that I dreaded waking up because it meant I had to face reality every morning. I pushed for euthanasia when everyone around me looked like I had lost my mind, and I still don’t know if I didn’t a little bit. I’d get so mad on the days he wasn’t doing well, because I just wanted things to be calm again. I said to myself as I laid next to him and he couldn’t move any more than I would understand if he wanted to die. When he slipped into a coma I felt better, because at least it didn’t feel like he was suffering any more … and it meant I didn’t have to turn everything upside down to find some way to keep a child happy who had every reason in the world to be unhappy.

If an immigration official had pulled me aside during that period and told me that I had to decide right that second if I was going to be deported back to America and I was not going to see Colin again unless I took him with me how I would have reacted. Part of me would have been happy to be free of the work of caring for him. Part of me would have been terrified to never see him again. Most of me would have been in a panic that I was letting my wife down. If they had caught me during the week I tried anti-depressants, it’s doubftul I would have had the energy to get down to the immigration officials’ office. If it was one of the other weeks, I might have been happy for a break from the hospice, but desperately afraid to go back to it, because I might come back and find Colin had died while I was gone and I wasn’t sure if I would break down out of sadness, or out of happiness that he no longer had to bear the burden.

I would have hoped the immigration officials would have said: “You know what. This is not the time for this.” Maybe I would have been told to come back in three months (This woman seems to have shown up for the meeting of her own free will). Maybe my file would have “gotten lost.” I would have thought that, given the facts of the situation and the mess of a person I was, any rational person would have just sent me on my way and told me to take care of my family and that this could wait.

It would not have occurred to me that someone would have shoved Colin onto a plane with me and send me elsewhere without giving me a chance to organize diapers, a change of clothes, his medicine, his feeding equipment, his breathing machine, his stroller and some kind of medical helper before I even thought about making the attempt. He once almost stopped breathing on the drive from the hospital to our house because of a problem with the oxygen tank: I can’t imagine how I would have gotten him across the Atlantic without our whole support apparatus.

Assuming I got him alive to another country, would my first priority have been medicine, clothes, housing, medical machinery, a nursing staff, a new hospice facility? I had to prod myself through every step of the day back then: Get out of bed; put some clothes on; check on Colin; keep him entertained; get the nurse when something happened; grab breakfast as soon as my wife showed up; fill out the insurance forms; make sure the other two kids were OK; repeat; repeat; repeat. It would have been hard to pull myself together and start a whole new routine without my wife with me who, and this cannot be stressed enough, did the lion’s share of the work with Colin. Maybe this kid has a Mom with the strength and will of my wife. That would be about the only way there’d be a chance of survival — as much as there is one with stage 4 cancer — upon arriving in Honduras.

I’m sure the family, separated as it is now, is going through hell. Maybe they have a house. Maybe no one’s worrying about the condition of its lawn. Maybe someone will think to water it. It won’t matter much in the big scheme of things, but it’s better than a lot of the alternatives.

The Least You Can Do was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.