I've Just Received A (Well Intentioned) Death Threat

I received a death threat the other day.

Seriously, I did. Oh, not the kind that arrives in a sinister envelope pushed through the door. No shadowy knife-wielding stranger at the end of a dark alley, like Marion had to contend with in The Runaway Wife.

Nothing like that.

This one arrived quietly, almost casually you might say, tucked between photos of dogs and a recipe for Marry Me Chicken on social media. Easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention.

But there it was, stark and unignorable once it had caught my eye, and all the more shocking for it:

You are going to fucking die.

It was typed in Courier, which is practically the same as letters cut from newspapers. And the worst bit about it was, it came from a friend. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right? 😂

I don't mind admitting it was a bit of a slap in the face. Not because it was news: it wasn't. Also, it wasn't my first, but that's another story... think batshit disgruntled employee (him, not me) and you'll get the picture.

As a humanist, I’ve made my peace with the idea of my own mortality. It’s something I think about often: not morbidly, but with a kind of quiet acceptance. This is a short game. We get our moment, and then we’re gone.

Even so, the starkness of the words really hit home. There was something about seeing it written down, baldly, in that uncompromising typewriter font, that cut through all the noise. No euphemisms. No soft-focus language. Just the simple, inconvenient, sweary truth that every single one of us is heading in exactly the same direction.

And then, as if that wasn't bad enough, came the next bit:

Tell them you love them.

I can't lie: well-intentioned as it was undoubtedly trying to be, that did NOT soften the blow. In fact, it hit me like a punch in the belly.

Because here’s the thing: sometimes telling them you love them isn't an option.

It's horribly easy to get caught up in the small, painful, human business of life. Of misunderstanding and hurt. Family tensions. Words said or unsaid. That peculiar ache of being sidelined by people whose love you once felt sure of. I'm not talking about the honest disagreements: they happen, and they're part of being alive. I'm talking about the entrenched ones. The ones that calcify. The ones that turn into silence, into distance, into years you'll never get back.

A lifetime—even a long, generous one—is a blink. A nanosecond. We arrive, we love imperfectly, we get things wrong, we misunderstand each other spectacularly… and then we are gone.

I don’t say this lightly. Like a lot of people, I am no stranger to family fallouts: in fact, there have been times over the past four years where I've felt like the jam in an estrangement sandwich. And estrangement has roots - deep ones. Hurt, confusion, sometimes self-protection. Sometimes dignity. Sometimes not knowing how to find your way back, and sometimes finding the way back is barred by someone who just doesn't want you to be a part of their life any more. So telling me to tell them I love them? That hurts. Because it’s not just a closed door. It’s a door I can’t safely walk back through, even if it opened.

And yet.

Even within that complicated landscape, there is still a choice about how you live. You can't control the narrative that other people tell themselves, but you can be estranged and still be open-hearted. You can be hurt and still choose kindness. You can feel rejected and still refuse to harden.

This, I think, is the harder version of the philosophy in that death threat post. Not the roses-round-the-door version where we all dance and fall in love and book spontaneous trips and have long and meaningful conversations with strangers, but the quieter, braver one: to keep your heart soft in the face of rejection. To resist the urge to write people off completely, even if you need to step back. To hold love for someone who may not currently want or know how to hold it for you. And to remember, in amongst it all, to keep some of that love for yourself.

Because yes: we are going to die.

And love - even when it's complicated, bruised, imperfect - is still the only thing that really matters.

In my work as a celebrant, I’ve yet to conduct a funeral where love was totally absent. Sometimes it shows up as anger, regret, or quiet despair. It doesn't matter. It's still love, underpinning the grief. Love for the lost opportunities, love for what might have been but never was, love that aches because it feels unfinished. Love is messy, human, and sometimes tangled with pain, but it is always there, the thread that gives life meaning and, paradoxically, makes the inevitability of death feel like little more than a backdrop to the richness of being alive.

So perhaps the takeaway isn’t “Tell them you love them.”

Because sometimes you can’t. Sometimes the door is closed, or held shut from the other side, or simply no longer there at all.

Perhaps it’s this:

Live as though time is short, because it is. Love as though it matters, because it does. Not by putting yourself back where you’ve been hurt, but by refusing to let that hurt be the thing that defines how you move through the world. When relationships falter, as they sometimes will, don’t let that be the thing that hardens you. Carry yourself in a way that lets you recognise yourself at the end of your life: someone who stayed kind, stayed brave, and kept their heart open.

Not because it will fix anything — it might not — but because it allows you to live authentically within the life you actually have, not the one you wish were possible.

So here's to the death threats. May they keep on sharpening our appetite for life.

Because none of us is coming out of this alive.

#SusyMcPheeCelebrant #HumanistReflections #LiveFullyLoveBoldly #KeepYourHeartOpen #LifeIsShortMakeItCount #ComplicatedLoveMatters #CherishEveryMoment #MortalityAndMeaning #SoftHeartStrongLife #LoveInAllItsForms