A Year After the Threshold
Blake Suzelis, PhD, LMHC (www.blakesuzelis.com)
One year ago, I almost died.
My oxygen saturation was 28% in a hotel in the mountains of Cajamarca, Peru. Within days, I would be intubated, septic, and placed into a medically induced coma for 17 days. If I had not been life-flighted to Lima, Peru, from the mountain town of Cajamarca, Peru, I likely would not be here.
That is not metaphor. That is physiology.
And yet, a year later, I find myself asking a different question:
What is death?
Through the lens of duality, death appears final. It is the end of the body, the end of identity, the end of narrative. Duality divides reality into life or death, success or failure, here or gone.
When you are looking through those glasses, death feels like annihilation.
Carl Jung described the alchemical stage of Nigredo — the blackening — when identity dissolves, structures collapse, and the psyche descends into necessary darkness. In spiritual language, this is often called the Dark Night of the Soul.
When I went into a coma, I did not experience heroic transcendence. I experienced surrender. I lost control. I lost certainty. I lost the version of myself I had built over decades.
That loss was devastating. I grieved that former self for months.
Two days before my collapse, in ceremony, I heard the words:
“It is going to feel like you are going to die, but everything will change on the other side.”
At the time, I assumed “change” meant improvement. Growth. Positive transformation.
Now I hear it differently.
It did not say it would get better.
It did not say it would get worse.
It simply said: everything will change.
And that realization changed everything.
Through duality, we are constantly measuring:
Is this good or bad?
Did I gain or lose?
Is this success or failure?
From that perspective, my coma was tragic. Terrifying. Imperfect.
But through the lens of wholeness — when the dividing glasses fall away — the moment stands on its own.
Not positive.
Not negative.
Just complete.
I no longer hold duality in mind, body, or spirit in the same way. I no longer require my experience to justify itself as “for me” or “against me” in order to trust it.
Through duality, death says: “This is the end.”
Through wholeness, death is not finality. It is a moment. A threshold between states of being.
My near-death experience did not inflate me. It stripped me. And in that stripping, something unexpected emerged:
Fearlessness.
When you no longer fear death — the deepest fear underlying everything — what fear is left?
It did not make me reckless. It made me clear.
It reduced my need to prove.
It softened my urgency to force meaning.
It diminished my attachment to certainty.
It reorganized my hierarchy of fear.
That does not minimize grief. Bodies still die. Loss still hurts. I wept this morning remembering the man who lay hypoxic in that hotel room.
But I no longer see death as annihilation.
I see it as transition — sometimes biological, sometimes psychological, sometimes spiritual.
We experience smaller deaths constantly: identities dissolving, relationships ending, roles falling away. Most of us resist them because we believe they are final.
My body forced me into a larger one.
I lost everything that day — including the old version of myself.
And I gained perspective. Peace. The ability to return to warmth more quickly.
Death did not take my life.
It reorganized it.
If you are in a season that feels like dying — physically, emotionally, or existentially — you do not have to rush to make meaning from it. Just consider the possibility that what feels final may instead be a threshold.
Through duality, endings dominate.
Through wholeness, nothing is wasted.
A year later, I am not celebrating death.
I am honoring the moment.
And I am deeply aware that I am still here.
