In Memorial: Sarah Hansen

 

Today is the 10th anniversary of my sister Sarah’s death.

I don’t quite have words for this because I have no idea how it will feel. Time has changed and transformed my relationship to this event in inner ways that continue to evolve. Over the last 10 years I lost the rest of my nuclear family with my father’s death in 2014 and my mother’s death last year from Covid 19. 

It’s sobering to stand alone in the shoes of such loss and look at outwards towards the world.

This is actually a day with no number on it. It is just here. Whatever I do today, I'd like to come to it without haste, remembering that there is enough time to get here from wherever I am inside myself. 

How can I begin together from within myself on a single note, as though I was a single creature?

We often share amongst one another the notion that we’re a part of everything, that we're not separated from the world we live in, the people we know, and the universe we inhabit. Yet that is known mostly — if it is known at all — with the mind, which is a weak partner. My intelligence is a thing of the air.

My molecules, however, are of the earth, and know much better how they are a part of everything else. Because of their nature, they're far more educated than my intelligence is in this regard. If I form a good relationship with them, I can live more through a part that has actual wisdom regarding this question. So the foundation of my effort today begins in the cells, the molecules, the intimate texture of my being — not in my head which ponders these matters.

My sister’s death is a part of that organic fabric of being. I meet the truth of it with love, because this is the only ligament that connects the tissues of the matter.

Surely I wish she were here in body; but that cannot be. She is here, instead, in spirit; and so I am with her today, as much as I am with myself.

Warm regards to you this morning,

Lee