King of Terrors

Dear Unknown,

A bullet from an AK-47 smashed through the front windshield with a sound like shattering certainties. It whistled past my ear, leaving behind a vacuum of heated air that violated not just the space around me, but the very foundation of my understanding about life and death. In that fraction of a second, as I dove for cover and watched strangers scatter like leaves in a violent storm, I saw death introduce itself. Not with the formal handshake I'd always imagined, but with a casual wave that said, "I'll catch you later."

Where so many people died that day, I survived by mere inches and blind luck. For months afterward, I carried that moment like a stone in my pocket—always there, always heavy, yet somehow easier to ignore than to examine. I threw myself into work, into life, into anything that would drown out the echo of that terrifying day. But death, once it tips its hat to you, has a way of showing up in the most unexpected places.

Six months passed, and life had settled into a deceptive normalcy. I was in New York, hours away from giving a talk about resilience—an irony not lost on me—when I met an old friend for lunch. We hadn't seen each other in over a year, and the cramped Manhattan diner seemed to shrink the distance between then and now. Steam rose from her coffee cup as she leaned forward, listening to me describe that day—how surviving felt like having a date with death and, at the last moment, saying "rain check."

At some point she joked, and we laughed, the kind of laughter that comes when you're dancing around something too heavy to face head-on. The clatter of plates and murmur of conversations around us provided a comfortable buffer against darker thoughts. We drifted toward safer shores: stories of her family settling into American life, updates about her career shift, my wanderlust adventures, and shared bewilderment at Manhattan's astronomical rents. By the time we paid the check, death had retreated to its usual hiding place in the back of my mind, lurking just beneath the surface of consciousness.

The transition from the warm diner to the cool spring air felt like crossing a threshold. A street prophet—one of those New York characters who spread doomsday manifestos—stood outside, clutching a thick stack of fliers. My automatic "no thank you" was already forming, the native New Yorker's defense against unwanted solicitation. But something in his eyes caught mine, a reflection of the conversation I'd just had, perhaps, or a reminder that strangers or not, we are all bound to something we cannot escape.

"Actually, I'll take one," I heard myself say.

The flier's bold text struck me like a second bullet: "You have an appointment with death."

My friend and I exchanged knowing looks, both thinking about my "rescheduled" date. I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket as we parted ways with promises to meet at my evening talk. But as I descended into the subway, that flier burned in my pocket like a live coal.

The subway car swayed gently, filled with the usual crowd of tired faces and vacant stares. Under the flickering fluorescent lights, I pulled out the crumpled paper and read:

"There is no experience in life so generally dreaded as death. People seek to avoid death; they do not want to face death. At the funeral they place artificial grass over the rough clods and line the grave with flowers to hide the hideous fact of death. Many try and hide the 'king of terrors' (Job 18:14) by the embalmer's art, beautiful flowers, and comforting words. And yet most people do not fear death, they simply ignore it. But the fact remains that death is very real…"

The words "most people do not fear death, they simply ignore it" caught on something in my mind, like a loose thread that, when pulled, might unravel everything. The memory of those rough and terrifying moments flooded back—being hunted down like a wild animal, barely making it out alive. The screams, the chaos, the metallic taste of fear—all of it suddenly present and real again.

Even when we've watched loved ones draw their final breaths, we live as if our moment will never come, as if our turn will somehow be different. We build elaborate scaffoldings of distraction around the simple truth: we all have an appointment we cannot reschedule.

The subway car rattled on, but I barely noticed. The words on that simple flier had stripped away the comfortable distance I'd tried to maintain from my brush with death. Each passing station felt like a marker on a timeline I'd been trying not to see. Where does this train lead to? A strange embarrassment washed over me. Here I was—trying to heal from trauma, to leave it all behind and move on. But what if trauma isn't just about surviving the unsurvivable? What if it's death's way of tapping us on the shoulder, reminding us that the line between here and gone is thinner than we pretend?

Maybe true healing isn't about moving past death's reminder, but about learning to live with its constant presence. Not in fear, but in acknowledgment. Perhaps what we call trauma is really just the crack in our carefully constructed ignorance, a window forced open to a view we spend our lives desperately trying to ignore.

As the train pulled into my stop, I felt a strange lightness, as if accepting death's presence had somehow made life more real. The flier in my hand was just paper and ink, the street prophet just another voice in the city's chorus, but they had helped me see something I'd been running from since that bullet whispered past my ear.

Can we learn to see death not as life's shadowy stalker but as its intimate dance partner; two sides of the same spinning coin? Maybe our fear isn't really of death at all, but of the vastness it represents—the great Unknown that we glimpse in moments of trauma and spend our lives trying to forget. Perhaps our very image of death—this thing we so desperately try to ignore—is what keeps us from fully embracing life's uncertainties, from dancing with the Unknown in all its terrible beauty.

That night, when I took the stage to speak about trauma and uncertainty, I shared more than just a story about survival. I spoke about how death had introduced itself to me twice: once with a bullet, and once with a flier on a New York street. The first time taught me about mortality; the second taught me about living. And in a strange, unfamiliar way — neither was more real than the other — two different languages speaking the same truth.

Perhaps, that's what you've been trying to teach me all along.

Yours in the dance,

L