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

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity lately. It’s everywhere—people confessing online that they’re not living the life they want, that they feel misaligned, that something essential in them has gone quiet. I used to skim those posts and think, Well, at least they know what’s missing. It took me longer to admit that I’m one of them.

My work as a funeral director is meaningful. It’s intimate, sacred, and demanding in a way few people ever see. I’ve guided hundreds of families through their worst days. I’ve prepared thousands of bodies with my own hands. I’ve stood in rooms where grief hangs so thick it feels like a second atmosphere. I’ve done this work for so long that it has shaped the architecture of my days, my posture, even the way I breathe.

But it does not fulfill my soul.

There’s a version of me that only comes alive when I’m sitting in front of my computer, fingers hovering over the keyboard, the world narrowing to a single point of focus. Writing is the one place where my anxiety quiets. In the funeral home, anxiety is a constant companion—an ever-present hum beneath the professionalism, the compassion, the precision. But when I write, that hum dissolves. I can breathe. I can imagine. I can build worlds instead of burying them.

Fiction, especially, feels like oxygen. I can learn, fantasize, create entire universes where the rules are mine to make. My funeral world is heavy, structured, and sorrowful. My writing world is limitless. It’s the only place where I feel fully myself.

Sometimes I think about how strange my life is. I’ve handled more dead bodies than most people will ever see in a lifetime—more than many will ever see at all. It occurred to me recently that some people have never even seen a dead body. Not once. Meanwhile, I’ve spent decades tending to them, restoring them, witnessing the final stillness of so many lives. That kind of exposure changes you. It deepens you, but it also weighs on you.

And maybe that’s why authenticity feels so urgent now. Because I’ve lived so long in a world defined by endings that I can’t ignore the quiet truth rising in me: I want a life that feels like mine. Not the life I trained for. Not the life I’m good at. The life that makes me feel awake.

Writing does that. It’s the one place where I’m not performing a role, not carrying someone else’s sorrow, not bracing myself for the next call. It’s where I’m most myself—curious, imaginative, alive.

I’m not sure what living an authentic life looks like yet. But I know what it feels like. It feels like the moment the words start to flow. It feels like choosing creation over containment. It feels like finally listening to the part of me that has been whispering for years: This is who you are.

And maybe that’s the beginning.

So, in the new year, I’m choosing to turn toward that truth, even in small ways, and to live more authentically than I have allowed myself to before.