Alexandra Kathryn Mosca — Exploring Life and Death: A Writer's Journey

Knowing Yourself is The Beginning of All Wisdom –Aristotle

I’ve spent much of my life unsure who I am. Not in the dramatic, soul-searching way novels portray—but in the quiet, persistent ache of trying on identities like ill-fitting dresses. Funeral director. Writer. Model. Actress. Author. Each stitched with hope, worn with grace, sometimes discarded with sorrow. I’ve taken many roles—some ambitious, others dutiful. Through it all, I kept asking: Is this me? Is this the role that will make me happy? Feel real?

Maybe this restless search comes from my mysterious beginning. I was adopted as an infant from Europe, a continent away from clarity. Even my birthplace—Athens, some say, others Sicily—is uncertain. As a child, no one needed to tell me I was adopted (though the girl next door did, when I was five). I just knew. But my adoptive parents never discussed it, and the silence around my origin echoed louder than answers.

So I tried many identities. I searched for something that sparked joy. Something that felt like home. Eventually, I found that in funeral service. Guiding others through grief became my first calling. There was dignity in details, beauty in endings. Comfort in being calm in another’s storm.

But even as I tried to savor that chapter, I felt it starting to close in on me. How much death can one absorb before it seeps into the spirit?

Now, past sixty, I move more and more toward joy—fashion as poetry, shopping for moments, not things, beach walks where the tide never questions me. It simply welcomes me.

I’m learning that identity isn’t fixed. It’s a constellation of experiences. Each star is a memory or passion, forming who I am. It’s a collage of what I love. Sometimes, it’s a whisper. That whisper grows louder when we stop chasing and start listening to ourselves.

Maybe I wasn’t lost all those years. I was collecting fragments, pieces of a woman who knows joy isn’t a luxury—it’s her compass home. But I’m still searching. And if you’re searching too, I hope you will search along with me.