Two Sundays ago my younger sister Gemma passed away, leaving her last breath with her parents, sisters, husband and two children by her side.
At 10.24 pm we erupted, cried, grieved and held each other. I will never forget that moment for as long as I dance, breathe and live on this earth.
The great mystery, the creator-spirit, the Source field of all being, moved around and within her. She smiled from a place of beatific peace, a divine surrender and acceptance after days of surreal realisation.
Her body had become severely weakened after six months of rapid returned cancer and as I sat by her side the Saturday eve before her death I still couldn’t accept the possibility of her passing. I arrived earlier than planned and went straight to her home in Norfolk.
Surrounded by masked nurses and heartbroken family there was a strong energy of understandable fear in the front room that felt wrong to me. As sisters growing up we were both stubborn! She was barely conscious, if at all, but I sensed her panic. Her body was hardly there but her strong taurean will was very much holding on.
There was a bridge of some sort that needed to be crossed and I felt strongly guided to call in some healing energy, her spirit guides, our ancestors in spirit, her love of meadows, water and trees; feeling and releasing the imprints of fear and pain in her energy field, not giving up on a miracle.
Never letting go until I knew. Deep down. Tomorrow would be her last in this life.
There is a lot I could write about soul journeys amongst siblings and healing a close family member (or not) but I won’t right now.
That’s a post I will alchemise in the future when my grief and realisations of this collective moment on earth after so much mass trauma and institutional injury is evident, a time when the bifurcation of realisation has clearly been made.
We are in the slow birth of a new earth and grieving is a part of that.
But right now I want to share some visceral on-the-ground observations of grief from the perspective of someone who senses the karmic layers of a soul journey and believes and knows in her heart we are spiritual creatures.
I want to open up the floor of emotional choice and ask - what is permitted in the realms of quantum possibility after a family member dies young?
The sensation that startled me in the days after her passing was the visceral physical loss.
Since her initial diagnosis in 2020 a part of me had emotionally and cognitively adjusted to the possibility of her dying but she was a fierce and funny-ass mamma who left a strong mark. I couldn’t accept her passing until the very end.
She had built up successful businesses, raised a family, and still created what I called her ‘home-zoo’ of pets! She loved travelling and wanted so much more. There was tremendous force and personal will that was evident even as a young child and the effect on the family system of her passing feels immediate.
Waves of shocked tears come over me and leave suddenly, for who we are as a family has irrevocably shifted. I can’t fathom feeling whole again yet in my mind that doesn’t make sense. One less physical being in our tribe has become a new soul-star in the family constellation.
And then follows a whole other cauldron of feelings and insights that I didn’t fully understand but was able to comprehend more after a long chat with a good friend.
She listened for an hour as I relayed what had emerged at her passing, how the sense of her soul essence felt stronger suddenly and came to me whenever I walked the ancestral coastline of our childhood. The relief I felt that she was no longer in pain, the horror of her strong body reduced to such a skeletal form. The relief and strange anger. She could sting with words and yet I hear how much she loved me.
She has passed over to spirit and I imagine her life review (look up NDE’s). Hearing stories from relatives gives me a fresh perspective on someone I thought I knew so, so very well. I now see photos of holidays I hadn’t seen, hear funny boisterous tales of teenage years when I was busy escaping our challenging roots.
Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise, describes legacy as something you cannot create for yourself. It can only come with your passing and the grieving of those who knew and of you.
I miss her already and yet slowly I’m accepting it, the painful yet inevitable truth of the very different paths we chose and a growing awareness in recent years of how we’d crossed each other’s karmic path at least a few lifetimes before.
I can make spiritual and emotional sense of it all but I know in my gut I will be grieving the loss of my sister for the rest of my life.
It will turn up like her fast jokes (she was a natural comedian).
It will surprise me like her favourite song ‘Stand By Me’ being played outside the Sacre Coeur by a busker in Paris recently.
I will walk past the meadow we played on as kids and see all the new top play equipment she fundraised and rallied for as a mum and there will be feelings of deep sorrow and warm nostalgia.
Cancer is a controversial topic and until it’s there on your table no one really knows the path they will take. I pray for one ounce of my sister’s courage.
During the last three years since her initial diagnosis she had grown fond of the healing arts but was torn on what path to take. She felt tremendous responsibility to get well for others, to show up for her children and follow the expected guidance.
There were so many push and pull impulses going in within her soul. And her journey became a phoenix rising for me as well, discerning and unravelling my own unconscious drives and healing all potentials between us. I am only truly beginning to comprehend the many dimensions to this life she lived, the consequences, choices, the successes, the emotions we shared during those seminal childhood years.
And so now I face a choice - what life to live after my sister’s passing - and I feel it strongly as one of bold choices and unapologetic joy.
To step forth more and more into my own spirit and be free the way she wanted to.
Thanks for reading.
Photo by Stock Birken on Unsplash