One of my homework questions was how did you feel when you heard don Miguel Ruiz say, “You are born alone, you grow up alone and you will die alone”? I am not sure how to describe what I was feeling. There is a part of me that was like ok, am I supposed to feel surprised, upset, or scared. The part of that sentence that scared me the most was that I might die alone. Then I was like ok, so what. I am never alone. The Infinite is always with me, so even when there is not another human being with me, I am never alone. I am always with me, so I am never alone.
I have never minded being alone. There have been times I have preferred being alone. I am not crazy about feeling lonely, but being alone is not something, which scares me. Maybe that is because I have been alone in some respects since I was born. While I will never have the answers to the why, I was alone in the natal unit. I was one of probably a few babies who were not having someone coo over them, point at me, and make comments about how beautiful I was. Sometimes I wonder if my birth mother was alone at that time too. Even in the earliest of those days, I was not alone. The infinite was watching over me from the moment I was born and continues to watch over me now. I have always felt this circle of angels around me, whether I listened to them or not is another story.
For me, being alone does not mean I am the only one in the room. It just means that I am alone in the space I am in at that moment. In many respects, I was alone when I was born, as I was the one who ultimately decided when I was going to enter this world. It was not until a few years ago that I learned I had fetal distress. I was alone in that state as an infant and at some point had to learn how to communicate that to the outer world. As this tiny little fetus, I somehow found the inner strength to fight my way into this world alone. I am sure my birth mother must have felt alone as well, as she was a single mother in the late 1950’s and giving birth to a biracial child that she would never see.
Even though my parents who adopted me did their best to raise me, I did grow up by myself. My parents could give me guidance, but I was the one who made the choices I made. It was my body, which grew and developed on its own. Even though other people were growing up around me, they were growing up as they were growing up and I was growing up as I was. We were all going through the same process, but we were doing it alone.
For me, it really does not matter who is in the room with me when I die, because I will be dying alone. How I die will be about me and nobody else will be doing it with me. I have no doubt there will be people who will be sad when that time comes, but what they feel and do is about them. When I do, I will not be alone, but I will die alone.