TTP Presents | Angel of Death: The Calling Few Understand (YouTube)
TTP Presents | Angel of Death: The Calling Few Understand (Vimeo)
About This Short Film
I’ve been trying to make/create this for a couple of months. I was not concerned about creating a perfectly polished production or a carefully planned series. I wanted to create a true accounting of the calling that has shaped almost my entire adult life – the one that pulled me into the long work of walking people home, the isolation that came with it, and the strange disorientation that followed when the dying finally slowed.
It never quite came together. The words stayed scattered. The timing felt off. Then, on one of the most physically and emotionally difficult weekends I’ve had in a long time, it suddenly arrived.
The migraine that I countered beforehand but could not overcome or defeat felt more like forced rest than illness. The unusually quiet house. The weight of old grief sitting heavy in my body. And the quiet realization that the day before this all settled into my consciousness had been my sobriety date – four years since the night God met me in the dark and told me to get real and show up.
Everything I had been piecing together for nearly two months found itself in the recycle bin – the entire folder for this particular project. That weekend, the words finally ordered themselves, and they were nothing of the notes I had been collecting. I recorded them in only minutes, typing them into the script almost wholly from the journal entries I had handwritten in the couple of days prior.
I reached out to a couple of contacts for help with the voiceover, the music and the copyright concerns. We put simple, royalty free scenery footage underneath. And now the short film is live.
This is not a testimony of triumph. It is a telling of what it has cost to be trusted with the thin places, and of the slow turning from resentment toward gratitude and humility. It is also a word for anyone else who has carried a similar assignment – those who have been the ones who stayed when others could not, who have lived more years inside the experience of dying than of ordinary living, and who now find themselves trying to remember how to live among the living again.
If this is your path, or if you simply want to understand the one I’ve walked, the film is here.
Film Credits
This video is not about being special. It is about what it costs to be trusted with the thin places between life and death, and about the strange isolation that follows when the long season finally ends.
If you have carried a similar weight, if you have been the one who stayed, the one who held the door open, the one who never quite learned how to live among the living again, this is for you.
You are not alone in it.
And the calling is not a curse.
c./Twin Tree Project
Writer and Director: Christy Grimes/TTP
Producer: Twin Tree Project
Stock Footage: CopyrightCloud
Voiceover: ElevenLabs
Music: Denis Pavlov/Pixabay
Full Transcript
I don’t know how long this will be, but if you believe that you have a calling from God to be what I have come to understand is considered a death doula, what I call an “angel of death,” then please be patient and listen because this is for you.
I have been seeking guidance from God about why.
Why I am the person I am. Why my life has been shaped the way it has.
In recent days, in the throes of yet another migraine which now feels more like forced rest than anything else God has shown me this.
When we finally surrender to the calling God places on our lives, something quiet and steady begins to unfold.
We discover we are not given just one assignment. Most of us carry several. But there are a select few whose primary calling is rarer, heavier, and more isolating than the rest.
I am not talking about the people who sit with their own parents or spouses or children as they die the ones you expect to be there for someday. That is sacred, and it is normal.
I am talking about those who are called into caregiving and service in a way most people find frightening.
Many of them work in the medical field nurses, hospice workers the ones who make a living walking this line. That does not take away from the gift. We all have to make a living.
But there are some of us God pulls into these roles completely unprepared.
For me it began with a grandparent. As I grew into adulthood, it expanded. An aunt. A cousin. A friend. Then, my father. Then my best friend of more than two decades – the one I had grown up and matured with. Then my mother. Then my father-in-law. Then my guru my teacher, my earth angel.
And of course the horses, the dogs, the cats, the birds, the wild animals we rescued that could not be saved.
Somehow I was the common denominator. The one who held it together while everyone else was falling apart. The one who held hands in the room when even their own children could not stomach to stay.
I was so completely surrounded by sickness and death that the majority of my adult life has been lived inside the experience of dying rather than being alive. Called not only to go to others as they died, but to bring others into my own home to die. Nearly two decades of it. Whole seasons with no break in the clouds only the continuous, heavy work of staying present while bodies failed and spirits left.
There comes a point, after you have devoted your entire being not just your mind or your emotions, but your whole self to that service, when the long season finally ends.
The deaths slow. The house is quiet. You can finally rest.
You still have a disabled autistic son who depends on you for every need. You still have a spouse who carries the material weight and somehow still manages to hold you up through your grief and confusion and emptiness while you claw your way toward acceptance of the role you were actually called to walk.
As I sat this past weekend with the questions and the insights God has been answering, I realized something else.
The day before had been my sobriety date four years clean from every legal and illegal substance I had leaned on before I finally gave myself fully to God. Prescription drugs I’d been prescribed – antidepressants, benzos – then the alcohol, and pain medication I was never prescribed.
Four years ago, on August 16, 2022, God spoke to me in the middle of the night when I thought I was going to die. My mother had died in 2020. There was a pause in my calling, it seemed. I had fallen into alcohol abuse and addiction.
Then I learned that my guru, my teacher the man who had been a father figure for decades was now facing terminal cancer and would be entrusted to my care because his own family could not walk him home.
God came that night and made it clear: I was needed. I had to stop what I was doing with my life, get real, get right, and show up not just be in the room, but be present at every level.
I had always been obedient. For decades, I had done what I was called to do. But I had not done it with full faith. I had done it almost from obligation, and for a long time I missed the gift He was trying to give me.
The dying just kept coming, and I never seemed to take anything from it. Until the last one my guru, who died in the fall of 2023. Something about that crossing, at that time one year sober, finally broke through.
I have spent the last three years trying to understand what happened that day. Over the last couple of weeks, and especially this past weekend, God has brought real clarity.
He showed me the places where I was still holding myself back. He showed me the friendship I had kept when I had distanced myself from almost everyone else the one that still carried spiritual purpose for both of us, and for my husband and family as well. He showed me that I needed to examine my own heart and my own place in it.
And He showed me why I have been walking through this valley of the shadow of death for the last three years.
When the house was finally quiet from the dying, that is when I found myself more lost among the living than I ever felt in the confusion and pain of the dying.
I do not know how to live an ordinary life. I never built one.
I am not lost because I follow God I am never lost that way. But I cannot seem to see past the human damage anymore. The heavy parts. The hard parts. The places where grief, body, and spirit all collide.
I have met my own death more than once.
At least three times, probably more I never even noticed. Once after a miscarriage and during a period of severe infection that I just couldn’t seem to overcome. The second time when I delivered my son and hemorrhaged my heart nearly stopped for an extended period.
Another time, just earlier this year, I made it to the hospital and the staff looked at me like they could not understand how I was still alive. I told them, half-joking, that God was saving me so I could keep helping other people die. The joke did not land. But it was the truth.
Later I learned the name for what kept happening in my body: broken heart syndrome. The human cost of compounded, never-ending grief.
There are good days. There are stretches where I feel almost normal again. And then something in my body panics, because it knows those stretches never last.
I used to be a professor. I used to stand in front of a theater full of students and lecture for two hours without notes. I was clear. I was respected for my voice.
I gave that career up when my father became ill and I fell into full-time caregiving. I see now that it was God. But I still carry resentment for the debts I never paid and the life I never fully built.
I am almost fifty. My credentials are twenty years out of date. My knowledge base is out of date. My soul feels so old some days that I wonder if I should even still be here.
I cannot go back into the mental health system as it stands. As a psychologist I cannot stomach what is being done to people especially to children. I was always too honest, too concerned with righteousness, too unwilling to tolerate bureaucracy and nonsense. That reputation would not survive now.
So I started a blog. I began documenting the journey the relationship built with God in the middle of all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I tried to share pieces of it with the people around me. Most found it uncomfortable, even those who knew I was speaking not only from experience but as an ordained minister.
The thing is? People of the world, not just in it, prefer the shadows. They do not know what to do with someone who has lived this close to the thin places for so long.
I live behind the veil most people do not even see. I live inside it. And that isolation is real.
There are not many of us. There are not many who can sit with you in silence in that reality and be a comfort simply because they already know.
The only ones I ever had that with were among those I helped home. They are not here in the flesh now. But they keep coming to me in spirit. And they keep telling me the same thing: you need to do this. You need to speak. You need to write it, but you need to speak it.
So to anyone who sees or hears this and knows me and wonders what happened where did you go? I went somewhere most people do not want to be. But I did not go there alone. And I was not sent there without purpose.
I know I am hard to understand. I know some of what I say sounds outrageous. But it is the truth. I say it because I do not want you to waste your life missing what is right in front of you.
When I show it to you, some of you get angry. Some of you think I am manipulating you. Some of you call it spiritual psychosis or gaslighting. My heart does not carry those things. It could not have gone where God has taken me if it did.
But, I understand it is hard to believe. I get it. If I had not lived it – experienced these things – I might not believe it either. And for what it’s worth? Even I didn’t come to believe it easily.
To those of you who feel or know that this is also your calling if you recognize the isolation, the purity of heart required, the strength and the faith demanded, the decades that can be consumed by it, and the strange disorientation that comes when the dying finally slows please, hear me.
You are different.
You are truly made different.
You are truly trusted by God.
Do not be like me and resent that gift for too long. Do not let the loneliness convince you it is a curse. Treasure it, even when it makes no earthly sense.
One day He will show you.
It will not be fine and fluffy. It will not be clouds and unicorns and rainbows. It will be gruesome and bloody and dark and foggy and wet and stormy, and lightning will almost strike you. But He will show you the purpose.
He will show you that it mattered. He will show you that it was worth it even if not a single human being ever validates it. Even when it costs you the ordinary life other people get to keep. Even when you stand on the other side of a long season and no longer know how to live among the living.
He saw something in you that could hold the door open. That is no small thing. That is a high and holy responsibility.
Carry it with gratitude. Carry it with humility. Carry it with as much grace as you can through Him.
And when the grief comes, because it will, let it deepen you rather than harden you.
You were made for this. And He has not left you alone in it, even when it feels like He has.
If any of this resonates with you, reach out. Reach out to each other in the comments. Reach out to me. I am often covered up and quiet, but I will make the effort to reply.
I no longer care about a career. I no longer care about proving myself according to the world’s measures of success.
My husband has taken on the material provision willingly, and I am learning to release the burden of other people’s perceptions or ideas of success.
All I care about now is serving the God who called me according to His purpose and believed in me enough to orchestrate my life from the beginning from being placed in a Catholic orphanage at birth, to being brought home hours away into a family where I was not blood, to the parents who were imperfect and carried their own religious wounds, yet were so faithful to God that they taught me to trust Him even when I did not understand.
He knew what I would need. He placed the people in my life who would teach me what I needed to know. And He called me to walk almost every one of them home.
I say none of this from a pedestal. I say it from the deepest humility of someone who has been dragged through the darkest, most horrific places and brought out again for the sake of others.
I am no longer resentful about the life I laid down.
God has shown me there is honor in it no matter what the world thinks.
The only reward that matters is knowing you have done what He called you to do, and that your heart has been obedient along with your body.
Intention is everything. Growth is everything. And He gives the grace and the forgiveness we need to keep leveling up.
So keep going. Keep growing. Keep learning. Keep healing. Keep believing. Keep giving.
But employ your discernment and your wisdom. Grow and understand those gifts. They are required gifts for this path for this calling we live as God’s angels of death. Carry that with you.
Remember: God is with you.
And you are loved.