The Choice

A Story of Death, Awakening, and Divine Purpose

I don’t tell everyone this story. I don’t claim it to be my identity, nor do I seek the often intense attention that comes with being a cancer survivor. I often find the story’s necessity reveals itself in specific conversations; when a new friend needs confirmation of our connection, or if a young heart is struggling in life. Cancer has a unique way of leveling the field and perking an ear. The experience I share below is no longer the most profound I’ve experienced - but it was the first. And we always remember our first with a little more romance than the rest. Don’t we?

And so, in this continued process of baring my soul to the world, in hopes of living in my fullest authenticity, I share with you one of my most vulnerable - and valuable - moments.

I’m grateful you’re here.

---

The Poison in My Veins

Fifteen years ago, at twenty-one, I was drowning in shallow water.

The oil fields of northern Alberta stretched endlessly around me, black gold pumping from the earth while I sat trapped behind a computer screen, plotting gas wells with the mechanical precision of a man who had forgotten his own soul. Each day blurred into the next - eight hours of fluorescent lights and spreadsheets, followed by nights at the bar where I'd spend my blood money on liquid courage, hoping to fill the gaping hole where my identity used to live.

I had been an artist once. A singer. A writer. Someone who believed in beauty and meaning and the magic that lives between heartbeats. But that person felt like a stranger now, buried beneath layers of practical advice and parental expectations. Life cannot be good without stable income. The words echoed in my mind like a mantra, drowning out the rebellious whisper of my creative soul.

The tension between who I was meant to be and who I was pretending to be had become a literal poison in my blood.

It started subtly - a heaviness in my limbs that no amount of coffee could cure, a fog in my mind that made simple conversations feel like wading through molasses. Walking up stairs became a monumental effort. Playing tennis with my father, once a source of joy and connection, left me gasping and exhausted.

I told myself it was stress. Poor sleep. Diet. Maybe I needed more iron - the internet suggested as much in its primitive, pre-AI wisdom. I pushed through, as men are taught to do, ignoring my body's increasingly desperate pleas for attention.

The warning signs were there, written in blood that refused to clot. When my wisdom teeth were removed, what should have been a routine procedure became a week-long ordeal of hemorrhaging gums and gauze-soaked days on the couch. My body had forgotten how to heal itself.

Still, I persisted in my delusion of normalcy, driving to work each morning with my mother, plotting wells, consuming energy drinks and pretending my life had meaning beyond the promise of an enormous salary.

The Call

The phone rang through the car speakers on what seemed like an ordinary evening. My father's voice, usually warm and curious, wavered with an uncertainty that made my mother's knuckles whiten on the steering wheel.

"Where are you right now?" he asked, his words heavy with the weight of news not yet spoken.

Two days prior I had decided to have blood work done - my doctor had called with the results. Instead of the simple iron deficiency I'd imagined, instead of the steak dinner we'd planned that night to cure my ailments, she was sending me directly to the hospital. Emergency admission. And pack a bag to spend the night.

The word cancer hadn't yet been spoken, but it hung in the air between us like a storm cloud, dark and inevitable.

At the hospital, we joined the congregation of the suffering - parents clutching feverish children, elderly souls wrapped in pain and prescription bottles, the walking wounded holding bloodstained gauze with trembling fingers. The waiting room was a temple of human fragility, and I found myself oddly moved by the nurses who navigated through it all with practiced compassion, angels in scrubs tending to Earth's broken inhabitants.

My father arrived with a small weekend bag, his face set in the particular mask of stoic readiness he wore in crisis. There was a laser focus in his eyes I rarely saw, but when life demanded it of him, he became a pillar of strength. As his only son, I couldn't imagine the thoughts racing through his mind, the way fear must have been eating at his enormous, sensitive heart.

We sat in silence, the three of us, staring into an uncertain future where every possibility - tragic and miraculous - seemed equally real.

The Diagnosis

The young doctor who pulled back the curtain around my hospital bed was nervous, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead as he avoided my eyes. He was too young for the white coat he wore, too inexperienced for the words he was about to speak. For five endless minutes, he rattled off medical terminology and blood count numbers, delaying the inevitable truth like a man walking toward his own execution.

Finally, through tight lips, he delivered the verdict: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. ALL. A blood cancer typically found in infants or the elderly, rare for someone my age and in my physical condition. The irony wasn't lost on me - I’d been working out religiously, trying to sculpt my body into something worthy of love and admiration, while cancer was quietly rewriting my DNA from within.

"There's a high success rate for remission," he said quickly, as if the words could soften the blow. "But we'll need two to three years of chemotherapy and radiation. We don't fully understand recurrence rates, so we throw everything we have at it and hope for the best."

I wasn’t sure if I’d expected hysteria. Drama. The kind of emotional collapse that seems appropriate when death comes knocking at your door. Instead, somewhat surprisingly, something settled over me like a blanket of absolute certainty: I was not going to die from this disease. It was as certain to me as the morning’s sunrise.

The fear of death didn't even whisper at the edges of my consciousness. This was simply information to be processed, steps to be taken, a challenge to be overcome. Perhaps it was a trauma response, or perhaps it was the deepest wisdom I'd ever accessed - I’ll never fully know. But sitting in that hospital bed, surrounded by the antiseptic smell of modern medicine, I felt unshakeable in my conviction that this was not my ending.

It was my beginning.

The Transfusion

Leukemia, I learned, is a civil war fought in the bloodstream. The bone marrow - that sacred factory where life is manufactured - becomes corrupted, producing malformed soldiers that crowd out the healthy troops. These cancerous cells flood the system, suffocating normal function and leaving the body defenseless against infection.

The first solution was as dramatic as it was necessary: complete blood replacement.

For two days I drifted in and out of medicated consciousness, as nurses appeared like phantoms beside my bed, hanging fresh blood bags and removing the old. In my delirium I created elaborate stories about my donors - imagining their lives, their passions, their fears. Were their memories somehow encoded in these crimson gifts? Would I absorb their dreams along with their platelets?

At one point, I was convinced my sense of taste had changed, that someone else's flavor preferences were now mixing with my own. The boundary between self and other seemed as permeable as the IV line carrying foreign life through my veins.

Throughout those endless nights, I surrendered completely to the healing process, allowing my body to do what bodies do best - fight, adapt, survive. My exhaustion was so profound that consciousness became optional, a luxury I could afford to set aside while the real work happened at the cellular level.

Clarity

I woke to a brilliant Alberta morning, autumn sunlight streaming through the hospital windows like liquid gold. For the first time in weeks, perhaps months, my mind was clear.

The brain fog that had plagued me was gone, dissolved by healthy blood and restful sleep. I could think in complete sentences again, follow complex thoughts from beginning to end without losing the thread halfway through. The simple joy of mental clarity brought tears to my eyes - I had forgotten what it felt like to be fully present in my own consciousness.

My oncologist, a warm and competent woman who would become a close companion through the coming storm, explained the treatment protocol. Two to three years of chemotherapy and radiation. Beginning very intensely for the first few weeks, and becoming more simple and routine into the later years. The timeline felt abstract, incomprehensible to someone who lived so completely in the present moment.

First, though, came the bone marrow biopsy to test for a particular gene. If I carried it, I would need a bone marrow transplant on top of everything else - a long, brutal procedure that I watched another young patient learn about with his mother. The fear in their eyes was palpable, and I never saw them again after that day. To this day I often wonder about that boy, and hope that his story found its way to healing.

Fortunately, I didn't carry the gene. My path would be difficult enough without the additional burden.

The Assault

Chemotherapy, I discovered, is warfare by other means. There was no targeted strike against cancer cells, no precision bombing of the enemy. Instead, it was scorched earth - poison everything that grows quickly, kill it all and hope the cancer dies first.

Hair follicles, stomach lining, the tender flesh inside my mouth - all became casualties in this chemical war. I understand now with grim clarity that future generations will look back on chemotherapy the way we now view bloodletting and trepanation: barbaric medicine born of desperate ignorance.

Kill everything to kill the one bad thing.

The plastic mesh fitted to my face for brain radiation therapy felt like a medieval torture device, holding my head perfectly still while invisible rays bombarded my skull. Leukemia, my doctors explained, was one of the few cancers clever enough to breach the blood-brain barrier, so we had to attack it there too.

My body went into shock almost immediately. I'd been in excellent physical condition before the diagnosis but now I had nothing in reserve. In the first week, I lost nearly forty pounds as my body consumed itself in the fight for survival.

Every day became a battle against nausea, exhaustion, and the constant ache of bones rubbing against the thin hospital mattress. Sleep came in fragments, interrupted by nurses changing IV bags and checking vitals. Reality began to blur at the edges, consciousness becoming as fluid as the medications dripping into my veins.

Between Worlds

In the space between waking and sleeping, between sickness and healing, something extraordinary began to happen.

My dreams became more vivid than waking life. I could slip into sleep at will, creating vast adventures in my mind - flying through impossible landscapes, making love with ethereal beings, building worlds with pure intention. When nurses interrupted these journeys, I would simply close my eyes and return to exactly where I'd left off, like pausing a movie to answer the door.

The boundary between dream and reality dissolved completely. I would watch my parents reading by the window, see every detail of their movements, hear my father clear his throat - all with my eyes closed. When I opened them, the scene was identical. I was seeing through some other kind of vision, perceiving the room from a perspective impossible for my physical body.

Sometimes, lying on my side facing the wall, I would close my eyes and find myself floating above the bed, looking down at my own sleeping form. I could see the entire room, my parents in their corner, the medical equipment humming quietly in the background. My consciousness had separated from my flesh, and the freedom was intoxicating.

In this state, I felt none of the weight of sickness. No pain, no nausea, no fear. I was pure awareness, unburdened by the failing machinery of my body. It was like taking off a heavy coat I'd worn for so long I'd forgotten it wasn't part of me.

The Journey

One evening, while adventuring through the lucidity of my astral imagination, I felt myself being drawn upward by an irresistible warmth. It was as if a string connected to the space between my eyebrows was pulling me toward something infinitely welcoming.

Beings of pure light began to appear alongside me, their essence clothed in white, trailing ethereal energy like wedding veils in a cosmic wind. They stood as though welcoming me - beckoning me - toward what felt to be pure love. They were familiar without being recognizable, conjuring without speaking words. I passed dozens, maybe hundreds of them as I moved toward what could only be described as the source of all light.

It was then the realization hit me with crystalline clarity: I was dying.

The most clichéd narrative in human storytelling was unfolding as my personal reality. The tunnel, the white light, the beings of light - every near-death experience I'd ever heard described was now my lived truth. I spun to witness my body as a speck far below me now, motionless on a bed that seemed miles away.

Questions flooded my consciousness. Was this really happening? How could I leave my parents with such devastation? I'm too young! I have so much left to do!

DON'T I HAVE A CHOICE IN THIS?

The words echoed through the infinite white warmth surrounding me, followed by profound silence. Piercing silence. A vacuum of light and no-thing.

Then, clear as thunder and gentle as a mother's whisper:

"Everyone has a choice."

The voice was everything - father, grandfather, mother, the love that holds galaxies in their dance. I didn't just hear the words; I became them. They vibrated through every atom of my being, dissolving fear and filling me with the deepest knowing I'd ever experienced.

The Teaching

In that simple phrase - everyone has a choice - entire universes of understanding opened before me.

The dialogue continued within me. Spoken but not said. Felt as a state of being and understood deep within every cell of my being.

Does this happen to everyone when they die? They get to choose?

Yes, but most never become aware of it. They simply dissolve into the all without question.

Why do people choose to leave?

Because in leaving the body, they understand how much suffering they've been carrying. Your world teaches people to push through pain, to accept exhaustion as normal, to live in a constant state of stress and struggle. When souls taste true freedom, true joy, true love - when they remember what peace feels like - they rarely want to return to the weight of physical existence. They also understand, as you do now, that this isn't their only chance. In their next visit, they hope to navigate more skillfully.

Is this real, or just another vivid dream?

This is happening in the consciousness you call dream state. Your brain is a bridge between dimensions, allowing you to travel between the physical and astral planes. Right now, you see with two sets of eyes - one that knows the 3D world, and one that knows the infinite reality beyond form. This place of in-between is where we commune most intimately.

What should I do?

Whatever you choose is already perfect. In your choice, I love you with all that has ever existed and all that ever will exist.

The mystery of death became clear understanding, knowledge so deep and integrated it felt like I'd carried it my entire life.

The Weight of Love

I floated in perfect neutrality, wrapped in love so pure it felt like warm honey, contemplating the choice before me.

On one side: absolute peace. No more poison coursing through my veins, no more struggle against a society that had forgotten its spiritual purpose, no more desperate search for identity in all the wrong places. This place was perfect balance, complete wholeness, the end of all seeking.

On the other side: the faces of everyone I loved.

My father's sensitive heart, which would shatter if I left. My girlfriend, who would carry the scar of my departure. My mother, whose strength would be tested as she held others through their grief. All the beautiful souls whose lives would be touched by the unnecessary sadness of my death.

I began to see the ripple effects of my choice - how my departure would send waves of pain through the lives of people I'd never even met, friends of friends who would question their own mortality, lovers who would hold each other tighter in the face of life's fragility.

But there was something else calling me back: the beauty of contrast itself.

In this place of perfect balance, I felt everything and nothing. It was complete, it was perfection embodied, but it was also static. I realized that feeling - real, deep, transformative feeling - only existed in the space between opposites. Joy without sorrow had no texture. Love without loss had no weight. The duality of physical existence, for all its pain, was what made experience possible.

And I wanted to experience. I wanted to taste morning coffee and feel sunshine on my skin and hear music that made my soul dance. I wanted to laugh until my belly hurt and make love with wild abandon and comfort friends through their own dark nights.

As I was being held in this place - this womb of cosmic consciousness - it was still and it was everything, and still I understood my desire for the course grain of life.

A spark ignited in my chest - a seed of purpose I'd never felt before. Where I had once been lost in other people's expectations, now I felt the birth of my own north star. I was meant to return, not as the confused young man who had entered this hospital, but as someone who carried the memory of divine love in every cell.

I was meant to remind others that they too were divine, that the contrast they were living was sacred, that every joy and sorrow was part of a perfect cosmic dance.

The Return

The entire exchange seemed to last for infinity and for a single second. With one last look at the blazing light that was pure love itself, I made my choice.

I wanted life. I chose life. I wanted to inspire life in others.

I wanted to love my life fully, to show up as my whole sensitive, creative self and be strong enough to choose healing over comfort. I wanted to sing again, to write again, to create beauty that would remind people of their own infinite nature.

Most of all, I wanted to laugh - deep, abundant, joyful laughter that would echo through the lives of everyone I touched.

I choose life.

The Awakening

My eyes opened to blinding hospital room light. For several moments, I lay perfectly still, hands folded under my head, staring at the wall beside me. The memory of my journey began to fade the way all dreams do, but the seed planted in my heart remained, already putting down roots in the soil of my transformed consciousness.

Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes as I felt the embrace of God dim from the palpable energy I'd experienced to something more subtle, more sustainable for human existence. I mourned the leaving even as I celebrated the returning - mourning the pure soul-to-soul communion, celebrating the chance to live that communion through imperfect, beautiful human love.

I thanked God with every breath for the life I was about to begin.

The life I had chosen.

The life that would be dedicated to reminding others of their own divinity, their own choice, their own infinite capacity for love.

---

Fifteen years later, I can say with certainty that the man who left his body that night in an Alberta hospital was not the same man who chose to return. The seed planted in that moment of choice has grown into a mighty tree, its branches reaching toward anyone seeking shelter from life's storms, its roots drinking deep from the well of divine love. It’s taken all of these fifteen years to integrate. It will continue to reveal for many more.

Cancer didn't make me sick - forgetting who I was made me sick. Cancer was simply my body's way of demanding that I remember.

And in remembering, in choosing life over comfort, struggle over stagnation, love over fear, I found the purpose that had been waiting for me all along: to live so fully, so authentically, so connected to the divine spark within me that others remember their own light simply by being in my presence.

That is the gift of choice. That is the power of consciousness. That is the reason we're all here - to choose, again and again, love over fear, growth over comfort, life over the countless small deaths we accept when we forget who we really are.

You are divine. You are infinite. You are love itself, having a human experience.

Never forget to choose.