The day before I nearly died, I visited a pumpkin patch. My mother's mind had yet to be claimed by schizophrenia, and my marriage had yet to be claimed by divorce. For the weekend, my husband and I had custody of his eldest son, and our own two children were in good spirits.

There was a carnival going on, and my mother loved riding the Ferriss wheel. We looked out over the rail town where my kids attended school and smiled.

I knew that everything around me was fleeting, and not in the kind of way that everything is naturally impermanent.

More specifically, I realized that my mother's grip on sanity was slipping, that my children's school would be closing, and that my day of marital bliss was temporary, itself partly the result of the long hiatus my husband and I had just experienced— a period of time in which he had his second known affair and impregnated a young woman who'd be driving down to Georgia from West Virginia in two days' time.

For some reason though, the carnival and pumpkin patch made all this feel better.

Both the rides and pumpkins were seasonal happenings, temporary sparks of beauty in a poverty-stricken, rural Southern town. Giving myself permission to enjoy the beauty of the day somehow made it feel better to give myself permission to enjoy the people in my life, just as they were in that golden moment.

As we were leaving, my dad snapped a picture that I can still call to the front of my mind. He looked so jolly — extra grateful for reasons I'd later discover that he, my mother, my husband, the kids, and I were there together, the day before my 32nd birthday, the day before I nearly died.

My near death the following day wasn't my first.

Liver failure, due to an autoimmune reaction, nearly claimed my life during college. Meanwhile, my daughter's birth brought me perilously close to crossing over. I'd labored with her 39 hours and 42 minutes, much of that in excruciating pain.

My water broke early, and she was slightly premature. I knew that an emergency cesarean made sense, but I had the distinct feeling one of us wouldn't survive. Fortunately, her father convinced the nurses to give us just a little more time. We formed a conga line with his aunt, our unexpected doula, and literally shook our child free.

Our son's birth was less perilous, but I still felt death there with me. It was as though the reaper were my friend, holding back the proverbial "veil" as though it were literal curtain through which my son must pass.

For that birth, my husband was mostly absent, but my dad walked around the nurses' station with me. I would drop to all fours, and my father would rub my back gently as I breathed. My son came after 5 hours, wrapped in his caul.

He failed his hearing screen twice, and I later learned this was due to his autism. He had no trouble hearing, but his mind processed all sensory input differently.

I have many other stories about death.

Meanwhile, my 32nd birthday was the first time I consciously simulated the experience while risking it happening for real.

My husband and I followed a trail of yellow flowers into the forest, where we sat among trusted friends and drank the psychedelic brew known as Ayahuasca, the Vine of the Dead.

Having extremely limited experience with only cannabis and mushrooms, I braced myself for a breakthrough, and sat still as stone while nothing happened.

I raised my hand for a second dose, and then the earthy tea caught in my throat, demanding that I swallow it with intention. I became aware of the voice of my consciousness asking me how deep I wished to go.

I gave myself three opportunities to hold myself back before I stumbled face-first into the dirt. I saw something there glinting like diamonds. When I looked up, the trees, and my companions, were no longer there. Unlike anything I'd experienced before, everything pixelated and then vanished, leaving me in a void where I experienced myself at the cellular level.

As many report with Ayahuasca, I felt as though I died and then gave birth to myself. I sat in counsel with people I knew in my life, taking note of who was there and who was absent.

Then, I found myself in a corridor filled with hummingbirds. They fluttered around me, their wings beating together, creating the sound of a voice that answered my deepest questions.

Walking one way through the hummingbird tunnel would mean leaving my body behind forever, to disintegrate within the sacred grove. I expressed a willingness to walk this way if what's the universe demanded.

Instead, the hummingbirds fluttered their wings into a mighty roar. A great wind, generated by the hummingbirds wings, pushed me through the opposite way. I heard the familiar sound of my husband drumming, and I opened my mouth to sing.

Two years later, the hummingbirds would return.

I wouldn't see them this time, but I'd sense them as my grandmother lay beside me dying. Placing my hand on her head, I told her to walk with them.

I said they would lead her, and that everything would be okay. Her breathing calmed and she passed within hours.

I found out later that the stroke, which landed her in hospice, struck as she'd been seated in her kitchen watching actual hummingbirds flutter across her windowpane.

Later, I finalize my divorce and move to Atlanta in the wake of the pandemic.

I've receive a cancer diagnosis, and results from a scan indicate potential metastases to my liver and abdomen. The positioning is bizarre, and a specialist will need to come from a partnered hospital to complete the biopsy.

The day of the procedure, the specialist introduces himself to me and all the nurses who'll be assisting. He's using tech that's new to him, and he takes a few minutes to acquaint himself with it.

I originally think I'll be under anesthesia for this procedure because the woman on the phone used the word "sedation."

When I find out that "sedation" just means "heavy narcotics," I opt out because narcotics have a strange tendency to amplify my pain rather than remove it.

I accept topical lidocaine, and I study the screen where my liver's on display — battered already by the tragedy of my early 20s, now filled with what look to be little planets.

I think it's beautiful.

The doctor seems to enjoy my attention. He readies a huge needle that will pull little pieces of the planets out as part of an excavation mission. It makes a hard sound like a gunshot each time it springs back into place.

An Incredible Hulk hat and mask concealing all but his eyes, the young doctor smiles through the gunshot sounds and speaks:

You're doing great. Just one more time, and we're done.

I smile beneath my own mask and tell him he's doing great as well. One of the nurses kind of giggles, and then the world stops.

I smell gasoline and taste metal. The room appears to fill with tiny particles that then begin to choke me. I wonder if I'm seeing COVID-19 in the air. I can't breathe.

The doctor and the nurses begin to pixelate, just as my friends had appeared to do years before when I drank Ayahuasca. I'm not afraid. I am frustrated that death might have come even sooner than planned.

I faintly hear nurses clambering to hook up equipment while the doctor asks about my heart rate. Then, I clearly hear him command me to breathe.

I obey, and, slowly, the room and its inhabitants take shape again around me. Everything is spinning, and I think of those giddy childhood moments when I'd turn in circles and collapse on the ground.

I'm wheeled into triage and held for observation.

I lay there reading High Times until it's safe to leave.

What does it mean — this proximity with death, this experience of it as a process aided by pixilation and, sometimes, hummingbirds?

I really have no idea.

I do know that this June, after a car crashed into my body, I felt I may be dying, but the world kept its form. Rather than crossing over, I experienced the pain of the void that would be left if I had.

I filled this space by telling my children I love them in the final moments before my phone battery died and I was whisked away to the hospital for a week.

I'd originally been on my way to a grocery store. I chose the one I did because it was a closer walk than the Publix and I wanted to be home soon.

Since I've returned, I've noticed that my perception of time has shifted yet again. That temporary goldenness that I experienced at the carnival and in the pumpkin patch adhered itself to everything and then turned a sort of deep grey.

While this might sound depressing, it isn't.

For me, the grey is emblematic of smoke from the embers of a winter fire, rippling water illuminated by a haze-covered moon, and the soft bathrobe in which my body is currently cloaked.

Grey is comfort despite uncertainty. Rather than a temporary trick of the light, it's an enduring sense of peace, a sign that death has come and, somehow, allowed me to live.

This essay was written in response to a prompt for the Medium Writers Challenge. Want to help support my independent writing as I combat cancer and recover from a serious injury? There's a link for that: Kelli Lynn Grey's Flowpage (flowcode.com).