I was raised in a funeral home. As children my sister and I raced church trucks around the ornate viewing rooms where families gathered to say goodbye to their loved ones. Those loved ones, more often than not, were already laid to rest in their caskets, bathed in glowing pink light from above. A nod to the pink filter we must put on death to stomach it. To stand before it and confront the inevitability of our own end.

There was no such glow in the embalming room where my father worked tirelessly to transform lifeless flesh into some semblance of the person who once wore it. Fluorescent lights. Seafoam green tiled floors with drains strategically placed. The odor of decay, masked by the harsh stinging scent of pink embalming fluid.

For my family, death put dinner on the table. The extreme fear that should've been rattling in my veins as I ran past dead bodies with my sister became something more of a desire. I did not know what to do with my otherness. The sadness I was born with, though I cannot say it was truly mine. The overwhelming sense of loss. Of being lost.

My desire to die was a desperate grasp on a cliff's edge. By 16 I was an alcoholic. I drove drunk alone on Bear Mountain, closed my eyes and wondered if going off that cliff would feel like flying, even for a moment. If the Hudson River, my only true friend, would embrace me before it dragged me under.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. I wanted. I wanted. Well. I didn't actually know.

The death I craved was incorrectly labeled. I didn't want to harm myself. I wanted the harm already inside of me to stop. A yanked plug followed by deafening silence. The breathless exhilaration of being airborne seconds before it all ended.

The past ten years I have experienced one immense loss after another. My body and mind broke down after the second one.

If you can see the path before you, it is not yours. What if you can't see anything, though? The path, yourself, the way out, much less the way forward.

I was splintering in a dark so opaque I could not see my own hands.

My best friend on the other side of the country knew I could not do what needed to be done alone. She researched and called therapists on my behalf. I showed up to my first appointment and I kept showing up.

Five years, three therapists, several medication tweaks, and trying modalities that traditional therapy never offered me have brought me to a version of myself I never thought possible. The deaths have kept coming. In the last year alone I have lost both of my parents and my marriage. I have undergone a bilateral mastectomy that resulted in five surgeries and body trauma I did not know I would also have to grieve along with everything else.

The work I have done has led to me having the same conversation over and over again. How did I get here from where I was? What helped? Why do some therapies work and others don't? What is different? How am I still standing?

This is a publication about that journey and a companion to the process I have built from my own work. My own deaths. I call it The Map, four points of orientation that, used together, show you where you are and what's keeping you from moving. Astrology: who you are built to be. Tarot: where you are right now. Somatic therapy and brain modalities: what your nervous system is holding that your mind can't yet reach. Grip: the pattern you run when you're afraid. Answers aren't the point. Orientation is. Only you can do that.

I could not have done this alone and I don't want to. A group of crows is called a murder.

Crows are the only birds that hold funerals. They gather around their dead. They remember. They aren't afraid of the dark. They move through it as one.

A murder flies together. Join us.

If anything in this piece landed close to home: the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) is available any time, day or night.