The Mortality Lesson Hidden in Menopause

A room full of women reminded me: how we live is how we die

The other night, I held an event with a friend where fifty women gathered around a conversation on menopause. We watched a film. We talked. Questions rose and fell across the room: What is this? What do these symptoms mean? Why is it so hard to find answers?

There was something profound in that room, something I've been trying to name ever since. I call it shared suffering, and I think it's important to say that plainly, without rushing past it just to feel comfortable. Sometimes naming the thing is the most powerful thing we can do.

Mortality is intimate to me. I lost my husband to cancer. The suffering of that journey, his and mine, together, and yet separate, shaped me. It taught me a different perspective on how to live.

Menopause asks us, again and again, to reckon with impermanence. With change we didn't choose. With our body, our minds, our souls becoming something we don't entirely recognize. This is not so different from dying.

We walk through thresholds: our first period, our first hot flash, the last period we didn't know was our last. And each passage calls the same questions: Who am I becoming? How will I move through this? Will I resist, or will I meet it?

Menopause is a catalyst for us to own something essential: how we embrace our suffering in midlife is our rehearsal for mortality.

How we live is how we die. And menopause, this hormonal unraveling and remaking, is an honest invitation to practice that truth.

I don't think this is dark. I think it's the most alive conversation we can have. Because when fifty women sit in a room together and name what they're carrying, and ask their questions out loud, and turn to each other and bear witness, that is a community choosing to face mortality together.

That is how we want to live. And how we want to die.

It is how I want to live. It is how I want to die.