On Sisterly Love, Sanity, and Mourning.

Mina's memorial.

Many of you who read my essays know I recently journeyed to Seattle, WA to join others in honoring our beloved Mina who passed suddenly in February.

The journey there and back was anything but boring. Connections made and missed, cars doing things that unreliable motor vehicles will do. The day I traveled over from Bainbridge to Seattle on the ferry I walked on, had more than a couple of cocktails, and was met by my brother on the Seattle side. We grabbed a quick and delicious dinner before we joined the host of people who had gathered to honor Mina in a little facility not far from Lake Union.

My delight at seeing a once close friend with whom I had reconnected helped to offset the unsettling feeling which began to percolate as soon as I walked through the doors. I was ‘holding it together’ quite well until a 9 foot size photo of her, me, and my daughter overtook the projector screen. It was then I dissolved, the tears flooding to the surface. I clung to the anchor of my brother’s hand and leaned my whole frame into my friend, Alissa.

We wept. We laughed at pompous people. This was what we had promised each other when we had at the last minute decided to attend.

Though I had no intention of speaking at her memorial, I found myself magnetically drawn to the podium under the oversized blown up photo of my beloved Mina. It was as if she was nudging forward to clear my throat and speak my peace.

An anecdote of how we first met came spilling from my lips. 

We were in a darkened club in Seattle, the “Noc Noc”. I noticed her across the dance floor. She was wearing a black mermaid dress that clung to her curves. She was dancing. I moved across the floor and joined her, then invited her back to the table where the guy I was dating awaited. I’m sure he thought he was going to get doubly ‘lucky’ that night. I knew I had.

She enthusiastically began speaking about this ‘healing system’ (Matrix Energetics) she had just learned about. She was lit from within. She often was—my Mina. After letting her go on for a few minutes I couldn’t resist any longer. I turned and withdrew my own business card from my purse, a card that just happened to carry the same logo of the ‘system’ for which she was so excited. 

Handing her my card I said, “Baby, that’s my dad.” “You have his eyes,” she said.

That was it. She was my sister from that moment forth, but truly from long before. As I called her in my previous posts my “anam cara”—my soul sister. I went on to speak about how she helped to raise my daughter and how we also raised each other. I spoke of my anger and how it was nice to tune into the tenderness for a moment because the most dominant feeling for me since her death has been rage. 

I am softening… a little. 

Looking down at my left hand—my wedding finger—her moonstone ring glints at me. It was the only thing of hers I had asked for after her ‘passing’ if we can even call it that when a gorgeous soul is ripped from the land of the living in the most horrific way imaginable. Yessss! I’m still angry and I will most likely carry that anger for the rest of my life. Please don’t tell me to “let it go” or that “she is in a better place”. I may hit you, psychically if not physically. I haven’t got the stomach for placations either six months ago or now. I am mad. I wrote of the ritual of retribution I performed. It gave me little comfort, but I know it was part of me doing my part.

I am glad to have her ring, though. I was with her when she bought it many years ago, and it is a fond memory. I asked everyone I could think of who I was actually speaking to to get it to me and finally someone did. The right ‘someone’. Someone I needed to see and to see in the way I did. Privately. 

You see, it’s one thing to know someone publicly, vaguely, professionally. It’s entirely another to have held them when they cried and fell apart in your arms or laughed wickedly enough to get the old Trickster himself on his toes. Mina. It’s something to grieve with people who a person has ‘helped’. It’s another entirely to hold ‘watch’ with family, either blood-born or soul-crafted. The woman I retrieved the ring from was all of that and more and our talk was good for my soul. 

I don’t think I will ever be able to believe there was a reason for Mina’s death. I honestly don’t want to. It gives me no comfort.

Several people have tried to tell me a reason or another and most of them, who did so over social media anyway, I promptly blocked. No one who knew her well or knows me at all had such audacity. The one person who tried in person raised every hackle and hair on my body, but I found myself with as much restraint and grace as I could muster turning to her and saying, “Please stop. I do not now, nor will likely ever have the capacity or desire to participate in the conversation you are trying to initiate. I do not believe in a ‘reason’—and I don’t want to hear it.” To her credit, the woman backed off immediately commenting, “Great boundary”, as she graciously stepped away. There was no malice on either of our parts. For me it was so utterly inappropriate a suggestion it would have been a self-violation to stand there and listen.

We need boundaries. Even in death. Maybe especially in death.

It has been many, many years since I in any way resembled the amorphous ‘spiritual’ ‘edgeless’. I have edges and they are sharp. As angry as I have been about Mina’s death and specifically the way she died, I have also been protective of her and myself. You see, I will never be as kind or as welcoming as Mina was to people. It is not my way; it never was. And for all her graciousness with others I feel it came with a cost to her, and if I could I would make everyone who ever hurt her in life or death pay.

When we are staring into the void of formlessness sometimes it is appropriate to allow ourselves to dissolve, sometimes to cling, and sometimes to build structure like our motherloving lives depend on it. It’s important to know where we are in the process and to honor it. 

“Around my rage, which without a doubt runs deep, is grief and around that is grace.”

This I also shared at Mina’s memorial when I spoke along with the reminder that as ‘beatific’ as she is—she is also human. A damn fine one. One who, as I already stated above, has a wicked giggle, a giggle that could ‘break free’ at utterly inappropriate times. I can hear it now. A beautiful human of whom I have many photos ‘flipping off’ the camera. 

People do not instantly become saints when they ‘cross over’. They do not drop the woes, struggles and tribulations that burdened them in life. They do not immediately become ‘enlightened’ or infinitely compassionate or wise. Mina was more of those things than most, but I will hold to the pain she carried at least a little as a way of continuing to honor her humanness. It was, after all, her best quality. Not the pain—the humanity. It was what gave her heart its warmth and sparkle, but it was her patience with herself and others that gave it its depth.

And for anyone else who may be reading this who has lost a loved one: my heart goes out to you. I want to give you permission to remember your person as a real human being, too. Someone who had a nasty temper at times, someone who told dumb jokes. Someone who dealt with chronic pain or was terrible at communication. Someone who made you laugh and made your eyes roll.

My prayer for all of us, as I continue to soften into my own mourning of my beloved sister, is that we can stop ‘white washing’ death. That we can be with the beautiful, the grim, the holy, and that which is still composting.

Death can hold it all and we who go on living, can hold even more. 

Much love to you all, to you who knew Mina, and to you who have loved and lost and love again.

~Justice