Inevitable: Live Like You Are Dying

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My resume says forty years at the threshold of life and death. What it doesn't say is that I've been standing there since the day I was born.  

This book began at the bedside of a sheltered, dying woman in the middle of a cornfield in Minnesota. She was in her late thirties with terminal cancer. She had never eaten a taco, never allowed herself to imagine the places she might go. One afternoon, she asked me if she was dying. No one had told her yet. I was her hospice nurse.

The answer I gave that afternoon, and everything that unfolded in the days that followed, became the foundation of how I live my life.

Inevitable: Live Like You Are Dying is not a book about death. It is a book born from forty years of sitting with the dying — in NICUs, in hospice rooms, and in the tenacious space between one breath and the next. 

From those moments, I have come to a simple, urgent knowing:

The life you are waiting to live is available now. Drawing on ancient Hermetic wisdom, modern science, and experiences that can only come from a life lived in full embrace of its uncertainty, Inevitable offers a living framework for inhabiting your time on Earth with clarity, courage, and full presence.

Because here is what forty years at the threshold has taught me: a sheltered life feels safe. But safety, when it becomes a strategy for avoiding discomfort, keeps us small. And in the end, we find ourselves having avoided the very thing we needed most — the vulnerability that makes life feel real.

Things may not go the way you imagine they will. They go the way they are meant to. And when you can meet that truth — when you can step into the uncertainty rather than around it — that is what it means to live like you are dying.

Not someday. Now.

Inevitable is organized around eight Hermetic Principles — timeless laws that have shaped philosophy, science, and spiritual understanding for thousands of years. 

As I move closer to my own inevitability, I have come to see that every lesson and event that has shaped my life — from the seemingly inconsequential to the monumental — can be more fully understood through the lens of these principles. 

As the ancient philosophers who first articulated them intended, they offer a foundational map for the human experience.

Each principle is brought to life through:

• Personal stories from decades as a nurse, coach, and guide for people navigating life's most unscripted moments.
• The shadow side of each principle — where it shows up in the more difficult and often hidden corners of our lives.
• A living practice — guided, experiential explorations designed not just to be read, but to be felt. Each one offers an embodied way into the principle, beyond what the intellect alone can access.
• A reflection on what it means to live not on the outskirts of your life, but fully inside it — as if today were the day that mattered most.
• The historical and scientific context that supports each principle, grounding ancient wisdom in the language of the modern world.

The result is a layered experience: part memoir, part wisdom tradition, part embodied practice — and an honest reckoning with what it means to be fully alive.