Keeping Vigil

At the threshold of the Fire Horse

This piece was written in the slowed time of dying and published at the turning of the year. It traces what happens when clocks stop mattering, when mirrors become witnesses, and when keeping vigil becomes the only meaningful work left. Moving between hospice rooms and hay fields, folklore and neuroscience, agitation and clarity, it asks what it means to stay with someone all the way to the edge—and how to know when staying gives way to letting go.

Keeping Vigil explores end-of-life presence, terminal lucidity, the nervous system’s role in dying, and the ancient human instinct to watch so no one crosses alone. It is also a reckoning with control, grief, land stewardship, and the kind of light that follows mourning rather than resolves it.

Published on New Year’s Day, at the approach of the Fire Horse year, this piece stands at a threshold—between endings and motion, between what must be released and what insists on moving forward anyway.

Thank you for reading, for witnessing, and for being here.

Love, Kim

Links & References

Subscribe to Stable Roots: Essays, reflections, and field notes from Lavender Hill

Bramblewood Stables at Lavender Hill: The land, the horses, and the work that holds them

Relatively Stable Podcast: Conversations about grief, land, horses, and grounding in the midst of chaos

FX – Dying for Sex: Nurse Amy’s explanation of the biological stages of dying

Terminal Lucidity (End-of-Life Phenomenon): Overview and research on clarity near death

Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Fire Horse: Cultural context and meaning of the Fire Horse cycle

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