Angela Mizinska | Death Doula / Pet Loss Counsellor / Death Literacy Advocate & Educator

When my mother was pregnant with me, she tried to kill herself. She didn’t succeed, but I often wonder how those nine months shaped me—how I was quite literally marinating in death before I took my first breath. I have no conscious memory of it, of course, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like I’ve been wearing a coat—thick, heavy, and the blackest black. Not just in colour, but in feeling. Dense with grief. Saturated with a primal scream. And I’ve had an unusual ease with all things death, dying, and end of life from a very young age.

That early proximity to death shaped me in ways I couldn’t see for a long time. It wasn’t until many years later that I began to connect the dots.

Fast forward 30 years and I was in the Solomon Islands, about to scuba dive for the first time. What should have been an adventure quickly turned to terror. The moment I sank below the surface, panic took over. I felt disoriented—no idea which way was up. The water pressed in on me, and I felt trapped in chaos. Suffocating. Claustrophobic. There was no quick way out, and that only made it worse. I was submerged—literally and metaphorically—in darkness.

Years later, I made the connection between that experience and the time I spent in my mother’s womb. It hit me with a kind of poetic violence—how the fear and confusion of that dive echoed something deeply familiar. Maybe it wasn’t just my experience in the depths of the ocean. Maybe I was remembering being formed in the middle of a raging storm I couldn’t see, but could feel in every cell. The moment my mother’s overdose became mine, coursing through my tiny body.

Another couple of decades passed and life brought me to a very different threshold. I had chosen to engage in a therapeutic psilocybin journey, with a clear and sacred intention: to experience death, and to be reborn.

Not just brush up against the idea of death, but to truly meet it, feel it, surrender to it. And to be reborn, not only metaphorically, but viscerally. I wanted to meet death, not with terror, but with curiosity, peace and reverence.

When the day arrived, I took the medicine and surrendered. Within 15 minutes, I began my descent. At first, it was subtle—a slow heaviness pulling at my body. My limbs felt like lead, my breath faint—like sipping air through a pinhole. Then, just for a moment, the panic came. The terrifying recognition: I think I’m actually dying. That’s when it hit me—this was the medicine answering my intention. I was experiencing death and I let it take me.

And then I began to dissolve. Into everything. It wasn’t frightening. It was expansive, peaceful, and beautiful. So very beautiful. My sense of “me” fragmented, like dust breaking apart in a shaft of light.

I could feel my body, my dense, earthly form, disintegrate into something vast. I was no longer separate. No longer a person in a room. Just awareness. No boundaries. No edges. No “me” as I had known myself. Just everything. It was wild. It was exquisite. And peaceful beyond words.

Since then, I’ve carried a different understanding of death—not as an end, but as a transformation. When our bodies exhale for the final time, I believe what remains—our essence, our life force—dissolves into the great everything, just as I experienced. We return to the universe, scattered among stars and soil and sea. And in that, there is peace.

—Angela Mizinska (2025)

Editor’s note: Angela Mizinska is a death doula who supports both humans and animals, a pet loss counsellor, and a death literacy advocate and educator, hosting regular Death Cafés and facilitating events to promote understanding, awareness, and education around all aspects of end-of-life.  She is passionate about increasing death literacy and normalising conversations around all things life, death and everything in between. Bringing into the light subjects that have been kept in the dark.
Further information: www.angelamizinska.com.au

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