The W(hole): A Longing More Terrible than Death

by Susan Kacvinsky

Kelly Thompson TNWWY and Susan Kacvinsky

Apr 28, 2026

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Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve spent my life learning how to die.

My first ego death came after my soon-to-be roommate canceled me in favor of her boyfriend. I was three thousand miles from my family and two days from homelessness. I had no first, no last, no deposit. I swallowed my pride and called my mother to ask for a month’s rent.

She drew a smoker’s drunk-rattle breath. “I’ll buy you a one-way plane ticket home. That’s all.”

“What about my car?” I asked.

“Sell it,” she said, “and everything else that won’t fit into a suitcase.”

But every problem I had came directly from The House that Shame Built.

The bathroom door still had the hole in it where my father had tried to kick my mother’s teeth in, but she’d rolled away. My bedroom door still had the hole in it where I’d slammed my foot through in an adolescent rage. That bed she expected me to sleep in was the same bed where I’d withstood nocturnal visits from an age so tender I can’t tell you how old I was when I lost my virginity. Even after my father died in a probable suicide, that house vibrated with the ghosts of drunken brawls past, which had caused our neighbors to call the police. But in those days, there were no laws against spousal abuse. A wife had to swear out a warrant like any other assault, and she never would.

So, what if I sold everything and went home to an extended family, who had stood and nodded grimly, while my mother was hospitalized against her will, medicated beyond recognition, strapped into straight jackets, and thrown naked and screaming into padded rooms? My brilliant mother, whose real problem, it seemed to me, was that she was born into a culture that would not allow her to be brilliant and would emasculate my father if he ever did. Terrified of being pathologized myself, I’d run three thousand miles from New England to Los Angeles.

As I twisted the phone cord around my finger, trying to return to my body from a space near the ceiling, something in me said, “I’m going to depend on Grace.”

“Grace!” my mother bleated, truly terrified, “Susan, come home.”

I said, “I can’t call you for a while. You have too much fear,” and laid the phone back in its cradle.

A new age Christian Church called Religious Science taught me a five-step prayer they called treatment. Grace, or Love, or God would fix everything. I wrote gratitude lists and ignored the evidence of my eyes in favor of what they called “knowing the truth.”

The only trouble was that the more I prayed to know my wholeness, the worse my circumstances grew. This was my fault, a minister assured me, because “thoughts are things.” Thoughts create your reality. Since I kept recreating my childhood, that made sense. So, I resolved to control my mind by entering “prayer without ceasing.”

I recorded treatments onto cassettes for my Walkman and played them while I meditated or wandered through my little house, talking to myself like any person on a street corner. Alternately, I threw the Walkman aside, shook my fist at the ceiling, and yelled, “You take care of me!” as though I were ten years old and screaming at my parents to provide me a safe and stable home.

God was silent.

I twisted, writhed, and sobbed. I crashed through floor after floor of terror. At the bottom of that helplessness, my internal walls fell backwards. The last floor melted, and the ceiling evaporated. I blinked. Real peace, real stillness, real love. Capitalized “Love,” not emotional, not romantic. Not soft or hard, cuddly, or cozy. It wasn’t parental. And yet, it was undeniably Love, space without boundary, and that endlessness was so quiet and so empty that even I didn’t exist - except that I was breathing.

Blink, blink.

“Go get the paper,” Space said. “Domestic help wanted.”

And by move-out day, I had a job helping to care for two elderly hospice patients, and the room that came with it. So, I thought I’d discovered the answer. Grace.

I was hooked, too. I pined for those magical, hard-won moments when the structure of my personality fell mercifully away, and I was in that silent space I called the presence of God. I tried everything I knew to make it happen again. It didn’t. I was more than a little put out that I had to be in extremis before grace would deign to show up. Was I forever going to be five years old, looking up at an enormous world I could not control?

Scornfully, I called God, Mr. All-Powerful. “How,” I demanded, “is it fair that I should have to experience that childhood and then have to relive it in the healing process, too?”

It fills me with wonder now that I bounced from that domestic help job, then from couch to couch for the next four years, utterly dependent upon grace from a god I did not trust, without ever spending one night in my car. In one year, I moved twelve times, all without knowing until the last minute where I would land. At the 11th minute of the 11th hour, grace always came through.

And I was resentful about that, too. Why would God wait until I was completely helpless and terrified? “You’d think,” I’d yell at him, “Mr. All-Powerful could just send me a little money. Then, in my best Steve Martin impersonation, I’d add, “But NOOOO!”

By my last domestic help job, I had moved to a better new-age church, a mega church, one that was more interested in meditation and silence than manifesting money - which clearly didn’t work. The Self here was capitalized. This was the church where I met my husband. By this point, I was a spiritual counselor with a license not recognized by any state. I saw private clients, led retreats, and taught classes. I worked in pastoral care: Transition Support (we didn’t use the word “death” in any form), Grief Support, and Crisis Support.

I was still half-baked enough to wonder why none of the things I was teaching others worked for me. I was eye-rolling furious with that, too. When I prayed, I didn’t get help; I got healing. But I didn’t want healing. I wanted safety and comfort. And alongside that, I’d developed this overwhelming longing for the presence of Love, or space, or silence, or whatever it was called that I could sometimes touch when I was chanting in a language I didn’t understand. I longed for that Love so much it doubled me over my meditation cushion like a gut-punch. But like an untrained dog, it just wouldn’t come when I called.

One day, I was watching Blue’s Clues with my toddler for the hundredth or so time, and Mrs. Pepper was singing “I want to be a classroom teacher and teach the kids about life’s great features.” And the walls fell away again, and I was in deep, empty space. Suddenly, I knew:

I’m not a spiritual teacher. I’m a teacher, teacher.

At the next leadership meeting, I surrendered every ministry. I thought, since I was responsible for so much, that I should give them a month’s notice. But before that meeting was even over, I was standing on the outside of the glass doors without any responsibilities. My time as a church lady was over.

When I applied to the Los Angeles Unified School District, a bureaucracy bigger than some countries and as unmovable as the DMV, all the doors flew open like grace was blowing on them, and I was whisked to the only helpful person. Then, like magic, I was standing before a seventh-grade class with an emergency credential and no idea of what to do.

They ran around the room, screamed like banshees, and threw backpacks at each other in a school that saw 3-5 fights a week. I dropped into my own need to dominate. I needed to make them learn, make them do homework, make them behave. Make them was my job description. Though I never hit anyone, I became my father in my heart, my mind, and my frustration over my inability to prevail. Like my father, I yelled, and like my mother, they taunted.

I had, by now, a stable home, a marriage, a son, and a middle-class job that was more dependable than praying for a living - a measure of safety which I knew could be ripped from me at any time, especially if I refused to go to that abusive job.

The longing returned, more terrible than death.

And the longing sent me to years of bi-annual 10-day retreats into silence, held all over the world. The ache burned all day, while in nightmares, some huge and invisible god slammed me against the wall like a dog shakes prey to snap its neck. The tension between my real circumstances and the longing that was ripping me open from inside made me wish to die. And so, I did.

A silent retreat began long before I got there. I was terrified to tell my husband that I was leaving him alone with a small child for ten days. I was terrified to ask him for the money, because I had cast him as my father. I couldn’t see that because he wasn’t violent. And sometimes I had to tell outrageous lies to that terrible school because the retreats didn’t only happen in summer.

Once I confessed my heart to my husband, suffered whatever he thought about my leaving again to do something questionable, and put the non-refundable fees, airline tickets, and lodging on our credit card, the terror set in.

You’ve lost your mind.

Sleepwalking toward my own execution, I traveled to my destination. Once the silence started (no reading, no writing, no talking, no music - nothing but my own fucking thoughts), the projections began.

Suddenly, I hated - the loud way that one ate their cereal, the annoying way those people in the corner whispered, the way the tourist-retreatants with money snuck off to restaurants. I even smelled wine breath once. Oh, it was a hornet’s nest in my mind without the means of sending my yellow and black beauties out into the world to sting others.

Then, the tide shifted, trapping me in a death spiral.

I hated myself. What a reprehensible failure of a human being I was - a bad wife, mother, and teacher. Examples exploded on the silver screen of my mind. I was a liar, too; there was no doubt. What if they found out? I’d lose my job, then my marriage, then my home. I’d be homeless with a child, my own heart, toddling unprotected through a field of cactus.

I collapsed into grief for all that I was and all that I was not. I sobbed as if my father had just died, in a way that I never had when I was seventeen and he had just drowned. Back then, I couldn’t cry unless I was drunk. Now, horribly sober, I couldn’t stop. I poured my grief-soaked self into bed, curled into the fetal position, and cried until I was the one dead.

Then, it broke into the much-longed-for spaciousness - the beaming light of Self, pure being, without any story at all. There was no denying it. Joy was loud. It beamed through this body, as if I were a portal to another dimension. That’s hard to tolerate. Brightness is also painful, at first. If I hadn’t been on retreat, I might have had some celebratory drinks, just so I could stay in control. By day eight, with no means of discharging the joy, I was no longer in the doorway. I was the joy.

Turned out, Silence was not fragile. In fact, it could even go to a restaurant. Joy was attractive. It drew people to itself and spoke to them while I watched - from silence.

Upon my return, joy lingered for several days, splashing all over my husband until he gave up his resentment.

Eventually, the old stories, the old patterns, and the work of letting go of the past, one trauma eruption at a time, restarted. Proof I’d lost my silence. I lamented the fact that I was suffering. I wonder now if this phase could have been shorter or easier. That whole time, did I only have to stop thinking I’d lost something? Or thinking I was a protagonist who suffered a terrible childhood? What if I’d known that suffering wasn’t proof of anything?

So how long does it take? Hard to say. It took me four decades, but I’m slow. See, there never was a me apart from space. Perhaps I could have just met the suffering, introduced myself, and made friends. But perhaps, I wasn’t ready yet to befriend Death.

One day, my suffering arose inside joy and then subsided. I watched it come and go. Joy never moved; the suffering did. All I needed was the willingness to feel it. No complex stories about god or myself. After that, the only prayer I needed was: I’m willing to feel this. Because I was never, not once, successful at keeping anything out. No matter what metaphysical tricks I used or what substances I took or didn’t take, suffering was there. Inside space. That space is what I will die into when this old body gives up the ghost.

Death is a friend.

It’s not that I should never have difficult emotions or that I wouldn’t grieve if something terrible happened to someone I love. No, that armoring isn’t even a thing to want. Perhaps as long as I have a body, there can be suffering. Certainly, in my work with dying people, I see that. Even death is not a problem to be solved. There is nothing to resist, nothing to keep out, nothing I refuse to feel. That’s not passive, either.

Joy sings through me when I sit with a dying person, and it speaks to them when we are afraid or hurting. Tears are welcome. Grief is welcome. Even physical pain can happen inside this vast space. Often, dying involves as much pain as being born does. Is there anything I cannot accept? I don’t know, but I suspect there isn’t. Because I only have to be willing. Most of the terrible things, like losing someone you love, we have no control over anyway.

Some dying people become such lovely spaces that everyone, even the busiest doctors and nurses, puts down their burdens. They stop, one eye toward what needs to be done, and one eye on the endless space within each moment. Now, that’s living. These dying lovely-space-people become an environment. When I go, I want to go like that, but I can accept it, however it happens.

The embrace of physical death is the growing tip of my recovery. Even though it will likely involve as much suffering as being born, I can accept my own ending with love, even, dare I say it? Joy. I’ve seen people do it. I can, too. Being not-yet-dead is like being pregnant. Messy, graceful, or both, I am on a train that has only one destination.

It turns out just as Thich Nhat Hanh said. “When you know how to suffer, you don’t have to suffer.” That’s the joke. The way to end suffering is to embrace it. Then it’s not suffering anymore, it’s love or some facet of the diamond that is love. For me, that quality is joy.

Because Love is not transcendent, it never took me out of the human condition, no matter how I begged. It’s not located in some spiritual realm beyond or even within me. There’s no distance. It’s right here. Right now. There is nowhere else. Space isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for the not-yet-dead. No. It put me in harm’s way until I wasn’t afraid to die anymore. Then I was free.

Where has longing taken you?

Has it ever undone you completely? And what did you find on the other side?

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