Death’s Invisible Cloak

Anne-Marie Keppel
2 min readOct 31, 2022

Death can be a cloak of hard and heavy lead. It can accumulate the Big Deaths and become the pain you trudge with, weighing on your spine, crumpling your legs and twisting your ankles — and the hardest part is that it is invisible

Death can be a cloak of quills- the Little Deaths. It can poke and prickle and make thousands of tiny piercing wounds over your whole body — and the hardest part is the invisibility

Death can feel like a cloak of the sweetest baby’s breath nestled into your neck with tiny dreaming eyelids fluttering and you just want to hold it close and dear and never move in fear that you will remember the impermanence

The Cloak of Death can look like fearlessness, it can look haughty, indifferent, miserable, miserly, aggressive, criminal… it can look like rigor mortis in the form of an over-priced garment or car that the owner cannot afford

Death’s cloak can look, smell, like decaying hopes, untilled fertile fields and like too many out-breaths trapped in a stagnant phase of life spent in video games and social media

Death’s cloak can taste like one bite chewed but not swallowed, of non-nourishment, and deprivation or like its best friend Easy Lots of slippery butters, sweets and non-stop food fast

Death’s cloak can look Very Important with plans and schedules, busy-busy-busy, endless hours, power drinks and excessive health routines

The Cloak of Death can be hooded with mirrors, and bowls, razors and pipes, needles, papers, fire and bottles that clank with emptiness

Death’s cloak can feel like urgency, like love and promises, like little rushes of adrenaline pumping blood into temples and fingers and loins and the overwhelming desire to Rain Down Seeds over all of time and space

Death’s cloak can be silken, light, iridescent, trailing behind you dragging by your perfect pinky finger as you walk or dance through streets and fields and time — and only when it is stepped upon do you look back in shock of why you never noticed it there before

Death’s Cloak can be made of golden feathers- of wings that encircle the earth and touch the tip of the stars- that only started the rhythmic Beat of Lift and Strength and Power and Perspective after the realization that you were wearing, and proud of, your sacred Cloak of Death

The Cloak of Death is your only true Birth Day present. It will take on 10,000 various manifestations in your life. The riddle is that it is both your life and your death. The challenge is that it will always be invisible. The promise is, the weave of its consistency is the very universe itself.

© Anne-Marie Keppel

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Anne-Marie Keppel

Author, life-long meditator, intentional healer, weaver of joyful living & mama of three