Episode Twenty - Die With Me // Poetic Monologue on the AfterLife

In this episode, I go down the rabbit hole following my soul as if I've died, and describe the amazing things I find along the way.

death, dying, grief, cosmic adventure, memory, love, afterlife, spirituality, existence, connection, myth, hopes, dreams, afterlife, reflection

You can find me online at www.dearpsychopomp.com

or contact@dearpsychopomp.com

I hope your weekend is gentle and full of opportunities ♡

Transcript

Dear Psychopomp (00:02.114)
Welcome sentient meat suit, to another episode of Dear Psychopomp, let's talk about death. This episode is a little bit different. It's a sort of poetic manuscript that I wrote while contemplating with entirely too much espresso in my system. What might happen after we die? So whether you are comfortably alive,

spiritually unhinged, or just mildly curious, take a trip with me. Because this story doesn't start with death. It starts with a moment of exhale.

and the cosmic adventure that follows.

Dear Psychopomp (00:53.452)
I remember dying. I didn't notice the exact moment it happened. There was no clang of finality, no dramatic exit, just a silent uncoupling. One breath just didn't arrive, and I rose gently like a mist from the ground. Below me, my body lay like a comma, mid-sentence.

not yet finished. The faces around me blurred with warmth. It was love gathered in shape, not sound.

My brother's hand was on my arm. My cousin's whispers stitched through the air. Their grief hadn't arrived yet.

And there was music, I think. Or rhythm. Or a silence so profound that it had its own shape.

And then the pull came. Not downward, not upward, but inward.

Dear Psychopomp (02:08.119)
and I felt it and I moved towards it.

Euphoria didn't come from escaping life. It came from remembering it. All the good, the unbearable, the almosts.

I slipped out of my body not like someone chased by death, but like a sigh that had waited long enough. There was no pain, only soft warmth around the edges of my being, like sunlit breath inside a snow globe cracked open.

I rose above my skin, above the room that once held me, and I found them, my loved ones, stitched together by fear and memory. Their hands didn't touch me anymore, but I felt them anyway.

And I saw the way that their grief glowed.

Dear Psychopomp (03:14.07)
not cruel but reverent, like candlelight in a cathedral that no one speaks in.

I drifted across the globe, barefoot on the jet streams, tasting languages on the wind and laughter caught between skyscrapers. I haunted them, but kindly tugged a strand of my cousin's hair in her sleeve, whispered I love you through the toaster's hum. I lingered in the corner of old photographs with that smirk I used to wear.

And then came another pull. Beyond the clouds, beyond orbit. I entered the heliosphere like a dancer finding the stage. Satellites spun around me, metal swans on invisible strings. They sang in frequencies too low for memory, but perfect for wonder.

I pirouetted through GPS signals, curtsied to the weather probes, and waved to Voyager, still charting an exit.

The galaxy did not demand explanation. It opened like an ocean. I flew past spiral arms lit with stars ancient enough to remember the first dreams. I watched nebulae fold themselves into stories. And the universe did not feel cold. It felt like truth. Slow, vast, and full of embrace.

Dear Psychopomp (04:58.518)
Eventually I stopped being separate. I dissolved. Not erased, but absorbed. A breath in the cosmic lung. A whisper inside the solar wind. Not lost, but returned.

And from within that eternal weave, I still reach for you in deja vu in the corners of a room in every moment that feels unexplainably soft.

Dear Psychopomp (05:34.136)
There's a place where gravity forgets its rage. A ballroom spun from collapsed stars, swallowed light stitched into velvet walls. Here, black holes don't devour, they host.

I arrive in orbit weightless and wild. Galaxies shimmer above like chandeliers strung by time. Every planet I once wished on now hums beneath my feet. A rhythm matched to the pulse I used to carry in my chest.

Partners materialize in flashes. Lost friends. Missed versions of myself. All twirling through metaphysical waltzes. We don't speak. We resonate. No pain. No sadness. Just movement. Just... being.

Dear Psychopomp (06:36.652)
And in a corner of the universe, a row of disconnected phones sits atop a lunar shelf. They ring, occasionally, soft and slow. They are not linked to wires, but memory.

And when I lift the receiver, I hear someone I love, not talking to me, but about me.

Whispers tangled in sleepless hours, questions never spoken aloud.

Dear Psychopomp (07:14.562)
Sometimes it's my father. Sometimes it's the stranger who passed me by on a rainy day and asked me about my eyes.

Dear Psychopomp (07:25.74)
I cannot answer, but I do listen. Every thought sent out finds me. And I send back silence, so full of presence, that it feels like peace.

Because where I am now...

There is no pain. There is no sorrow either. Because those require contrast.

Here, there is only is-ness. Like water with no resistance. Like emotion before it was named.

The time doesn't pass, it folds.

Dear Psychopomp (08:11.884)
Regret doesn't ache, it releases.

Dear Psychopomp (08:17.674)
Here I do not long. I witness. I expand. And in that vastness, I remember every version of love I ever brushed against.

Dear Psychopomp (08:33.005)
I thread myself into the rain. Not the downpour, but the soft drizzle that drapes rooftops and memory. Each droplet carries a strand of me, an echo, a hum, falling on strangers who never knew my name. But they still pause and close their eyes as if remembering something.

I slip into the frogs. Their croaks, now part lullaby, part warning. Spring awakens with me curled in their throats, a vibration passed from pond to puddle, a pulse that leaps when the moon is loud. And I stretch into the aurora, not as color, but as what lives inside it, a kind of cosmic whisper. People stand shivering beneath

green ribbons of sky and I reach further aww like hands pressing through stained glass.

Dear Psychopomp (09:35.01)
My name no longer matters.

I am mist in the morning and shadow at dusk. I am the flicker and candlelight before the flame steadies. I'm the question that interrupts a dream.

I live in the static between radio stations, in the breath between a thought and a spoken word, in the way your spine tingles when a room feels full but no one's entered.

I am nowhere, not confined, not counted, but I am everywhere, woven into birdsong, into sidewalk cracks that remember laughter, into the wind that carries lost pages towards belonging.

You cannot bury a soul once it's threaded into tide and tremor. You can only listen closely and know. The universe didn't lose me. It simply learned a new way to keep me.

Dear Psychopomp (10:43.778)
You can only trace me in hints, in the way the wind forgets its pattern, just as you remember mine, in music that aches without knowing why.

in the shimmer between waking and sleep, where something unspoken still speaks.

You can only sense me like deja vu in a stranger's eyes or the hush before your name is called in a room that shouldn't know it.

I am no longer a story with an ending. I am the air between the pages and the breath behind the voice.

Dear Psychopomp (11:23.896)
They say that when the sky blushes violet and the trees lean just slightly inward, she passes through. Not a ghost. Not quite a wind. But the kind of presence that makes candles flicker even when the windows are closed.

Children hear her in the rain, soft syllables pattering on rooftops. A lullaby not taught, but remembered.

Elders sip tea beside empty chairs and speak her name like seasoning, knowing the sound feeds something deeper than hunger. She dances in the northern lights like a memory trying on color, weaves herself into frog songs under moonlight, and wraps her laughter around fireflies before they take flight. She is nowhere and everywhere. She is the ache behind beauty.

She is the breath that turns pages no one remembers placing on the window sill. And as long as someone speaks her name, softly, awkwardly, even just in a dream, she will remain.

not bound to earth, but braided into awe.

Dear Psychopomp (12:43.062)
A story too real to be history, too mythic to be fact, but just sacred enough to live forever in the hush between daylight and dark.

Dear Psychopomp (12:56.546)
They say if you stand barefoot in the grass under a moon that's too shy to shine, you'll see it. A cluster of fireflies swaying like old friends. No rhythm, but harmony. No choreographer, just knowing.

That's us. Not in form, but in flicker. Not in voice, but in shimmer.

We find each other again in moments the world forgets to label. A hush between verses. A scent that reminds you of joy without context. A firefly landing briefly on your wrist then dancing off with part of your heartbeat.

Our energy knows the way back, not through time, but through feeling.

We gather not because we planned it, but because the cosmos remembered, and because awe became a meeting place.

Dear Psychopomp (14:02.178)
So when it happens, when you see the fireflies outnumber the stars and your chest feels like a story not yet written, you'll know we met again. In light, in dance, in the little flashes the universe leaves behind so we never fully fade.

Dear Psychopomp (14:24.322)
Long after her body hushed and her laughter scattered into starlight, the myth of the Wayfarer took root. They say she stitched her energy into frogs and auroras, waltzed with satellites, haunted with kindness, and turned gravity into grace. She was not buried. She was dispersed among rain clouds that knew when to fall, among memories that glowed without context.

She became the glint in fireflies that danced toward reunion and the sigh tucked into music heard at just the right moment.

Children are told to look for her in the stars, especially the one near the tail of Lyra, where it flickers a second longer than the rest. That's her heartbeat, the one that never stopped trying.

So they sing to her with frog choruses and love songs on the radio. They whisper her name when the air shifts, when deja vu touches their collarbone and when awe arrives unannounced.

As the myth says, as long as someone tilts their chin upward with wander stitched into their lungs, she remains. Not as a ghost, not as a god, but as the feeling of being briefly, wildly, completely seen. By the stars, by the sky, by the firefly that paused just for you.

Dear Psychopomp (16:06.712)
Thank you for listening to this week's episode. It was such a joy to create. If this episode touched your soul, please hit the like button, share, follow, and subscribe. And if your platform allows, leave a comment and let me know what you think. Your support lights me up and keeps this podcast going. You can find me online at deersychopomp.com or contact at deersychopomp.com. Death isn't a secret. Let's talk about it.