Feeling Fate
A Memoir of Love, Intuition, and Spirit
A grief memoir with a paranormal twist, Feeling Fate tells the story of my fairy-tale romance with Tony and how a premonition that I would lose him magnified my love and gratitude until it came true.
While the book is honest about my struggles with grief, it also explores a few additional uncanny experiences that have helped me find meaning in action, imagination, and the irrational insights of the heart.
Available now:
My local indie, Secret Garden Books
Praise from early readers:
“[Sensel] is a captivating writer, articulate and mystical, without the usual preachiness, which makes her work accessible to a broad audience of those seeking comfort. Bringing readers along on her difficult journey through grief, she provides useful advice in the book’s second half for the bereaved as well as for those consoling them. A poignant, engaging guide to healing that’s infused with valuable insights into dealing with grief.“
— Kirkus Reviews
“A tribute to Sensel’s love affair as well as a spiritual exploration, the book navigates the process of mourning in intriguing ways. It is organized with an eye toward creating suspense…Self-deprecating humor dominates, making Sensel a relatable narrator. Her immediate storytelling combines with the dispensing of pragmatic wisdom, imparting a sense of the complexity of her bereavement. The book indulges in clever linguistic turns and word play, making it lively and upbeat, even though it is handling the painful subject of Sensel’s grief.“
— Foreword
“Joni Sensel’s finely-paced tale plunges us from the resplendent peaks of love to the horrid troughs of grief – and beyond. However, the emotions that teem onto the page are never allowed to blur her admirably controlled prose; nor, indeed, her sense of humour. Throughout this heart-rending memoir there’s a sense of larger powers at work behind the human tragedy: few books can convince us that a well-placed Hershey bar is like an epiphany – but this one can.”
— Patrick Harpur, acclaimed author of Daimonic Reality, The Secret Tradition of the Soul, and many others
“This book is a beautiful love letter that felt intimate and compelling, like looking at sand under a microscope or the stars through the Hubble. It’s a reminder that we are part of something grand, and that there is beauty in the small and in the vast. Profound. It filled my heart.”
—Martha Brockenbrough, award-winning author of The Game of Love & Death and many others
“Have you ever wondered how you might engage in life differently if you knew the ending? Or wondered about the might-have-been if you’d followed an ignored internal whisper? In her book Feeling Fate, author Joni Sensel takes the reader along on her personal journey via a hindsight love letter to the soul mate she lost too soon. Readers prone to pondering whispers and what ifs will find her book to be a heart-affirming and tender testimony to the miracles that surround our breathing lives and beyond.”
—Kayce Stevens Hughlett, MA LMHC and author of the Nautilus award-winning SoulStroller and other books
“Author Joni Sensel is fearless when it comes to delving into matters of the heart. Feeling Fate will appeal to anyone who has experienced deep love, all who have known grief and the many existential and spiritual questions that become especially pronounced when a loved one dies, and intuitive, soulful readers who, like the author, pay attention to spiritual whispers. Sensel’s memoir reflects a deep outpouring of her heart, an intimate window into her inspiring love story, and a hopeful account of what it means to both heal and hold on after the death of a soul mate. Reading Feeling Fate has softened me in my closest relationships, reminding me not to take life or love for granted in this precious time we are gifted with each other.”
—Sara Easterly, author of the award-winning memoir, Searching for Mom
“A beautiful and insightful account of love and the fervent path of grief and loss. Her writing helps the reader see the reality of grief and the journey of assimilating loss into life.”
— Danielle Christianson, MA, LMHC
“A book for head and heart. Heart—so obvious—because this is a full-bodied, passionate love story. Not some Top Forty pop-song about teenagers barely housebroken, but a real grownup love between a man and a woman in their fifties, two people who have lived well and learned well what they need, want, and can offer. But head, as well: I felt so honored to walk with this author, who leans towards skepticism by nature but is too intellectually honest to blind herself against evidence of guidance and Mystery as she faces the miracle of a love that death cannot extinguish.”
—Donna Glee Williams, author of The Night Field, Dreamers, and The Braided Path
Read the first chapter:
My Secret
My dearest Tony,
You’d been gone a couple hours, but your body was still here. All six-foot-two of you stretched out on the living room floor on the sheet the paramedics had used to carry you downstairs. They’d banged your big feet and shoulders against the wall and balustrade. As I followed them, I’d looked away. Pretended not to hear that clunking. Now I was crouched on the step stool in the kitchen, clutching my robe around me and trying not to see your husk from the corner of my eye. Your essence clung more to the kitchen cabinets you’d installed, the slate gray appliances we’d picked out together, the wood grain flooring you’d removed and replaced. But it’s a small house we shared, so your face loomed pale in my peripheral vision.
I hunkered over my knees, my position upright but fetal. I needed to be close to the floor. Where it’s hard to fall down. The floor your body was laid out on. It kept us together. I considered slipping down to the cold laminate and curling into myself there. Its chill seemed inviting. But I didn’t want to make the volunteer EMTs, mostly strangers, any more uncomfortable than they already looked.
They’d tried hard. For an hour. After my own thirty minutes of CPR on your chest. They were kind. Several lingered until Mom or the medical examiner could arrive so I didn’t have to wait by myself. You were gone. In the meantime, I had to make myself small, low to the ground, so the Universe wouldn’t notice me there. It had made a bargain with me, and the price had come due, but the real pain hadn’t hit yet. If I stayed small, maybe I could keep the pain smaller, too.
Mom and Dad arrived, sliding open the door. A puff of cold came in with them, the air chilled by the two feet of snow on the ground. I looked up but stayed down, my wrists pressed to my chest.
Mom bent toward me. “I’m so sorry, honey.” She probably put an arm around me. I don’t remember.
Tears choked my voice. “I’ve always known I wouldn’t have him for long.”
She straightened. “How did you know?”
She probably expected to hear of some illness, some diagnosis you’d had. There hadn’t been one. The paramedics had not wanted to believe the bottle of aspirin in the kitchen windowsill was there for our two arthritic dogs, not so you could thin your blood or treat splitting headaches. They asked over and over when I told them the truth.
Their persistence stirred a childhood wound—aspirin and I have an ugly history—but I understood why they kept asking. Nobody likes the grim fact that a strong, athletic man of fifty-nine might die in his sleep, without the slightest warning, at 4:45 in the morning. Your only health complaints were knees worn down by football and an old shoulder injury stirred by the lifting you’d done to single-handedly build dormers onto our house. You didn’t even carry the typical American’s spare twenty pounds. We’d pumped iron at our local gym twelve hours earlier. We’d made love in front of the fire before heading upstairs to bed.
But when Mom asked how I knew our time would be short, I shrugged through my tears. “I don’t know. Pre-birth contract?” The truth was too complicated to push out while weeping.
So I’m telling you instead, sweetheart. We never talked about this, though it was on my mind often. I tried once to share this secret. But my bargain with the Universe was hard to bring up. It seemed presumptuous to suggest I’d made a divine bargain for you as though you had no say in our love. You were too self-possessed, too powerful a man for me to claim such a thing. Even if I knew it was true.
More importantly, I was afraid to give my intuition weight. To put it in words. If I never said what I knew, maybe it wouldn’t come true. Better yet, perhaps I was wrong, a kook for believing divine forces made bargains.
Your death three years later confirmed my worst fears . . . while sliding rebar into the intuitions that form my spiritual faith. I’m put in the strange position of having lost the one thing in my life—you—that had convinced me of a benevolent Universe of wonder and love. And yet your loss and our fairy-tale romance are also my best proof of spiritual truths—a capital-I Infinite, divine forces of fate. If I’m to survive, I have to cling to that rebar. Searing or not, it reminds me that a grander reality exists. My heart knew the truth, and I have to keep trusting it. Through and beyond the despair of my grief.
I can no longer touch you or smell your scent on your pillow. My intuition, that most maligned of the senses, is the only one I can lean on to keep your love close. As far as I know, there were no other secrets between us. Please let me share this one with you now: all the hints that accumulated on my big premonition, like coral building a reef. They added up to my knowing. You gave me evidence you knew it, too, which kept us honeymooning for nearly four years. That internal wisdom deserves to be honored. I have to explain what my heart knew, and how.
For more, preorder now.