Terminal Agitation
On empaths and impending death
In the spring of 2019 I was on top of the world. My private practice that I ran out of my own office was full with a waitlist. I was dating someone I felt really excited about and for the first time I had much more confidence in my relationship abilities. I had just spoken at a heart-centered entrepreneurs conference and even though it was a small conference, it fulfilled a longtime dream of mine. The keynote speaker even came up and shook my hand, giving me a very ego-stroking compliment. I was a success or at least what I had been conditioned to think was success. I had arrived and I felt damn good about myself.
My mind did what I now consider to be magic. It rifles through the filing cabinet within my mind and the lived experiences in my body and connects the dots at the speed of light. And just like that, I know something — like in my bones and cells know something.
But in the background something was brewing. As an empath, I notice things but I don’t know I notice them until much later. This is one of those times. When I knew, before I even knew that I knew, that death was coming. That it was just around the next corner and my intuition could see it coming. It’s like when you know something is off but you can’t describe it and then you get blindsided by said-off-thing and then you realize Oh yeah I felt this coming. On this sunny spring morning, I noticed that off-ness as I drove to work.
Sitting at a stop light my attention was drawn to a man on the edge of sidewalk banging his head against a metal light pole. His arms flapped inside the worn clothes hanging on his body. His dirty face squeezed into a grimace, as he screamed out the pain he was feeling. His matted beard and hair had leaves and sticks clinging to them. My mind did what I now consider to be magic. It rifles through the filing cabinet within my mind and the lived experiences in my body and connects the dots at the speed of light. And just like that, I know something — like in my bones and cells kind of know something. This is terminal agitation, I thought to myself. This is the identified patient of the collective.
In family systems psychology, there is the concept of the identified patient within the family. The one child that struggles being in the world. Every family has that child or uncle or parent. Some might call them the problem child or the black sheep, I call them the scape goat, the empath, the intuit, the family sponge. They absorb all the feelings that their caregivers, siblings, friends and teachers won’t or cannot process. These sensitive souls are the pressure release valve for the systems that they live within. Their porousness and ability to view the world with the eyes of a seer makes them vulnerable. They are the path of least resistance for toxicity, repression, and the family baggage to express itself.
I immediately saw this man on the side of the road as that identified patient. Perhaps all his life. I would be making reductive assumptions if I were to label this man as homeless, an addict or mentally ill. It is so much bigger than that. I saw him that day as one of the hundreds of thousands of pressure release valves letting off the mass amount of unprocessed and suppressed pain of our world. Maybe he was releasing for himself, for his family of origin, maybe for his ancestors, maybe for the collective consciousness that was beginning to feel the rumblings of impending death. He was feeling all our terminal agitation.
The term terminal agitation was new to me, at the time, and I had been spending a lot of time thinking about it.
introduced me to it in her book Shameless, where she shares her own experience of the grief process she had to go through when her 20 year marriage died. The vivid description of her shaking and crying uncontrollably in a hotel room on her wedding anniversary. Her body “working its shit out before it could transition to what is next.” What she says is such a deep and unmentionable truth. Grief is unstoppable and it has a job to do. The body will find a way to work out what the soul needs whether that is our own individual soul or the collective soul. Nadia was putting words to something I inherently knew.Although, I didn’t understand at the time how I knew it. In hindsight, I can see why it clicked and I am surprised I had not heard it before. Not only did I know the death of a 25 year marriage — that lived experience of being curled up on the floor sobbing and shaking for hours on my wedding anniversary just days before the divorce became final — I also knew it through my work with the elderly. I had worked with the elderly in assisted living for years surrounded by this chaotic and unpredictable energy. The sweet old lady that in a flash would turn and try to bite my hand. The one who asked every time I came into the room if I was her deceased sister. The one who wandered the halls of the facility at night calling for her husband who was not there. This is how I know. My body always knows.
Terminal agitation, by definition, is the restlessness, anger, frustration, confusion and sometimes hallucinations that happen at the end of life. It manifests physically, mentally and spiritually, all the unprocessed and unconscious material gushing out. It also happens with dementia as the brain cells deteriorate and human consciousness has a distorted or damaged motherboard to express itself through. As a systems thinker and a strong believer in the hermetic principle of “as above, so below”, I always take any concept and apply it to all the systems. From the ones inside us to the ones in the cosmos — all the systems. So if it happens in our own psyche, it happens in the collective psyche. It happens when a part of us dies or a marriage dies or a star dies.
So what happens when an entire world is going through a shift out of an old paradigm or dimension? What happens when a collective consciousness is getting ready to shift from an experience of separateness and individuality to one of unity and oneness? Terminal agitation, that is what happens. And what parts of our collective are most available to rage with the anger, wander the streets in confusion and talk to those you and I cannot see but know what is coming, the vulnerable feelers in the world, that’s who. I know this because I am one of those feelers and I feel the agitated, crawling out of your skin, want-to-pound-your-head-against-a-light-pole feeling. I know it well.
The first time I remember feeling this agitation was at the age of 8 or 9. Hiding behind a dumpster in the school yard, pounding my own head, pulling my own hair, scratching my own skin, as my newly forming ego began to kill off the part of me that felt so. fucking. much. Or maybe my ironclad ego was killing off the part of me that was transparent and so excruciatingly unfiltered so it could take over. Or maybe both. So yes, I know terminal agitation in ways I had no idea I did. Again, my body always knows.
I could really go out on a psychic limb here and say that maybe on this 2019 spring morning the corona virus mutated into the version that would become the COVID 19 pandemic. Maybe it was when my ex-husband’s tumor metastasized in his brain. Maybe it was when, what I now call my old self, began her slow downward spiral toward death. My guess is…it was all three. All I know is that that I was more attuned to it than I give myself credit for and so was that man on the side of the road. And that more death that any of us ever could have every imagined was just around the corner.