Sisters and Spirit Communication
After my brother graduated from high school, my parents moved from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, and when their needs increased from aging, as my brother was in Massachusetts and I in Florida, it was our sister nearby in Rhode Island who became their principal care-giver.
She was a highly-dedicated medical professional whose knowledge served our family as she found the excellent nursing home our mother with Alzheimer’s was moved to, and monitored her medical treatments and quality of life, visiting regularly for eight years while our brother came less often and I once annually.
Relieved of a year of “thirty-six hour days” of home care for Alzheimer’s, our father coped, needing to reframe his life. Not having a personality bent to visiting fulltime in a nursing home, and with a need to control his life, still strong, active, independent, and very smart, he too eventually moved out of his home, but he at first moved into an apartment. My sister helped as she could as his experimenting took him to different apartments and assisted living facilities, changing friendships as he sought the intimate companionship he missed and desired. Then, after years, he reached a stage where he too needed a nursing home, and ultimately found in the last one the inner peace that had eluded him, along with the integrity of reviewing his life and realizing that he had lived it well—my inspiration at our final visit.
For our mother’s memorial service, I had been able to come to share my love and words about her. For my father’s I hadn’t, as I’d come to America to visit him in December, a month I’d questioned for its being risky due to snowstorms potentially delaying international flights. But I knew by my strong intuition that I was to come and that my father might be passing. Given previous years of occasional upset between us, I’d, instead, felt utterly surprised and happy by his new way of relating to me with admiration. He’d been worried for years about my not having a place in the world and now affirmed that he saw that I did. (I considered this a miracle.) My father had been my hero in my childhood and became that once again. With his passing in February and my remaining in India, my sister had full responsibility for a second parent’s memorial service. I asked a daughter to read a poem of mine about my father and my sister if I could carry his ashes to Maine where he would be buried. I didn’t hear from her, and she made the trip in what I would later realize was the right way for that to happen. But first I had to face my feeling disheartened by the thought that I’d been left out.
Learning of the burial, I’d driven to the orchard on the hilltop near my home in India and began a walk that took me among the tamarind trees until one seemed the right place to sit down and lean my back against the trunk. The ground was comfortable and the tree my support. Above me the sky was green from leaves. I stayed quiet letting the rejection of my hope sit in my chest until I heard my father speak in an inner way and surprised, I became alert. He spoke of my sister’s actions and of his understanding of me and how I felt. He spoke of his awareness of my love for him. He spoke in a way that allowed sisters to be different in how they lived their lives, and by the time he was through I felt a different kind of quiet in me. He helped me know that he understood my journey in life that he affirmed as well as helping me to accept my sister’s journey that is very different from mine. I could feel his love for me. By the time I stood and walked out of the orchard, I had been changed in my ability to better accept differences with equanimity. I let go of a memory that for most of our lives my sister and I had not been close.
In Love Cards, Robert Camp speaks of what birthdays reveal about personal relationships. Years ago I had read a friend’s copy, bought my own then given my own away. Yet I remember the description of relationships as karmic, or primarily (but not exclusively) fixed situations we bring with our birth. Further reading revealed that anyone born on my sister’s birthdate in January owed anyone born on my birthdate in February a karmic debt. I accepted that my sister had courageously, effectively, and with strong love fully cared for our parents where I had only been a part of their later years in brief visits from a geographical distance.
My realization is, “For those who are open to spirit communication and in a present life receive this opportunity, healing may come.”