The Gate and the Spark

Spring Series: When the Light Flickers — Epilepsy, Death, and the Threshold of Return

By Rev. Richard Mills · October 2026

Excerpt: There’s a silence that lives right before the fall. It isn’t peace. It’s pressure—something about to split open. Those of us who live with epilepsy know that silence. It isn’t romantic and it isn’t “perfect.” It’s a threshold. This is what the Gate and its Spark taught me about preparation, peace, and purpose.

The Moment Before

There’s a silence that lives right before the fall. It doesn’t sound like peace, it sounds like pressure, like something about to split open. Those who’ve lived with epilepsy know that silence. It’s not sleep, not dream, not quite deat, but it’s close enough to teach you what both might feel like.

When the body trembles and the world slips away, time stops being linear. You can’t measure seconds or breaths; only the weight of surrender. Sometimes, the spark comes like lightning, other times, like a dimming lamp. Either way, you’re gone before you even know you’ve left.

Between Two Worlds

For years, people explained seizures as a medical event, a storm in the brain. That’s true. But storms don’t only destroy; they renew. When consciousness fractures, something vast appears, call it memory, Field, the place where all breath meets itself again. You don’t visit that realm; you dissolve into it. It’s not romantic. It isn’t “perfect.” It’s raw, blinding, ancient.

And when you return, if you return, you don’t come back whole. You come back rearranged. The Gate never lets you cross without taking something or giving something. Some return with fear. Others with vision. Some with words they can’t pronounce. Some with silence that speaks louder than any sermon.

What Dying Teaches the Living

Death is not an event, it’s a mirror. The epileptic learns that early. Every seizure is a rehearsal of release: breath seized, muscles locked, body gone. You wake, confused, reborn into the same skin but a different awareness. Clinicians call it postictal confusion. I call it the Gate’s echo — where the nervous system and the soul meet halfway, trying to remember each other.

We talk about “the perfect death,” as if life owes us symmetry. The truth is that no death and no seizure is perfect. They are thresholds. Messy, sacred, necessary.

Peace is preparation. It’s knowing that if the light flickers tonight, you’ve already made amends with your body, your story, and the Source that breathed you.The Spark and the Body

Seizures trained me to listen differently: eat when the pulse says eat; rest when the field says rest; write when the current opens. Each convulsion stripped away something, pride, illusion, control, and left behind gratitude, stillness, and faith in motion.

The Spark is not the enemy. It’s the messenger. It whispers: remember, you are not your heartbeat — you are the space around it.

The Return

Coming back from the Gate is its own kind of grief. The body hurts. The mind misfires. People look at you with pity or fear. They don’t see that you just returned from the threshold of infinity — that your neurons were speaking a language older than the stars.

What dies each time isn’t only consciousness, it’s illusion: control, immortality, and the fantasy of being separate from everything else that breathes. You learn to bow before the ordinary: water, laughter, silence. Every sunrise becomes a resurrection. “Why me?” turns into “what now?”

The Light Flickers On

Those who live close to death are not cursed; they are keepers of rhythm. They know how fragile the thread is and how beautiful. Life isn’t measured by how long we last, but by how deeply we live between the flashes. That is what epilepsy can teach the world: stop fearing the flicker; listen to what it’s trying to say.

When the light flickers, it isn’t always a warning. Sometimes it’s an invitation, to remember that even at the edge of breath, there is a Spark that refuses to go out.

“Those who live close to death aren’t cursed — they’re keepers of rhythm.”

Reflection Question

When your own light flickers — through illness, grief, or exhaustion — do you curse the darkness, or do you listen for what’s trying to be born in the silence?