They are with us in the wind, the blue of the sky [column]

Wold Songs and Fire Chats

We said goodbye to my sister last week. She’d gone to hospital for a routine eye surgery, had a heart attack, went into a coma and passed away days later when the family decided to remove life support according to her prior wishes.

It was hard and sudden and devastating. There are things in life that leave you with gaps in your being and you spend years, maybe, figuring out how to fill them.

My sister was just 63 years old. She was the eldest of four kids. For me, who had been removed from my family by the Sixties Scoop, she was the lifeline to my family, my history, culture, language and knowledge of myself.

Whenever I had a question, whenever I needed to know something, she was always there. Even when I made mistakes which I have done often, she was always there for me.

There’s only my mother and my brother Charles and I left now. Our family has shrunk and each death diminishes it further. Once there were five of us. Now there is just our mother and her two youngest.

I am 57 years old. There are more years behind me now than there are in front of me and I spent a lot of time considering this on the long trip home after the funeral.

It’s funny how we refer to the last event of life. That’s what dying is, really. But we refer to the deceased as the departed. We say that they have continued on their journey, that they went to meet their maker, that they have entered Glory Land or Heaven or even the Happy Hunting Grounds. We say that they passed away, expired, died. More often we say that they left us.

I wondered about all that. I wondered whether, in that last great event of our lives, we really leave anyone. I wondered if something vital, pliant and irreplaceable is truly taken away from us. I wondered about finalities and how goodbye is such a shallow word for everything that you feel at times like that.

I had no answers but I do know that I stood at the edge of my sister’s grave and felt the depth of the hole where they laid her. That hole was in me too. It was cold and barren and lonely.

Dirt would fill the physical hole. But the one that existed in me was deeper than that and I pondered how I might go on to learn to fill it or if that was even remotely possible given the breadth and scope of the life we mourned for.

That hole seemed huge. It seemed like a part of me had vanished into it. I understood loss then. I understood that some people are geography and their departures leave a part of us in exile for the rest of our days.

But walking away from the grave, looking up at a sky so perfectly blue it hurt to see, I realized that my sister existed in that.
Moreover, she was a part of the trees, the ground, the wind, the river and everything that’s part and parcel of the world I’m left to walk in.

I can find her in a sunset, a sunrise. I can find her in the pastoral calm that stretches out across everything the moment storms break. I just only need to remember that.

I smiled to think of that. Smiled to know that when the wind blew across my brow from now on, that it would be like her hands touching me. When the rain and snow falls gently on my shoulders it would be as though she would be walking with me, comforting me, teaching me to heal. Or the moonlight thrown through a darkened window would be her voice telling me that the deepest and darkest night will always pass and that light always returns.

There’s no loss in that. There is no inconsolable pain. There is only the gradual realization that we the living have only to keep what is real in front of us at every waking moment and we are healed. Love is real. So is faith. So is yearning.

Do our loved ones really leave us? I don’t think so. I believe that they return to spirit as they were when they came here and there is spirit in everything. I can never be lonely knowing that. I only need to stand upon the land and breathe and be united again forever.