Seven years has passed since my brother Gene died on February 24, 2000. It feels like forever, but it’s only been seven years.

He was just 46 and had been struggling with cancer in different parts of his body for five years. He had highs and lows that he always managed to pull through and in my ‘Pollyanna’ way I just believed that he would live forever. But when I saw him come around the corner in Mom’s kitchen that last Christmas, I knew in my heart that he was going to die soon.

When he died shortly after, I had just had a 1½ month half old baby who was very colic and she just seemed to cry all the time. We moved to Fort McMurray when she was just 10 days old and I felt very isolated (not knowing anyone) and certainly had post-partum depression too. My Mom had also just had a kidney removed due to cancer and she was very sick as well. Our whole family was in turmoil. To say that those were dark days for me would be an understatement. I felt like I was dieing too.

Gene’s death changed everything in my family and in me. It shook us up right down to our ‘roots’ and in the way our family interacted. I think within each one of us we did experience a death of what ‘our family’ meant to us. His death seemed to tear us apart (from each other and also inside of ourselves). It created a winter inside of our hearts. Yet it was in that stark barrenness that I began to question what it all meant. Why had he died?

In tarot ‘Death’ represents the death of the old order, the break up of blockage and constriction. It is all about transformation. Death brings renewal and rebirth on all levels of being. The snake sheds its skin to be reborn.

Seven years later, I am transformed. I am so different from the person I was before. I’m deeper, I’m stronger, I’m more me. Was that because of Gene?

As I mentioned earlier, my little Gabi cried all the time after she was born. It was unbelievable to me (and to anyone else that heard her) that a baby could cry so much, hour after hour, day after day. It was so overwhelming that there were times when I wasn’t sure how I would even survive the day.

Then, shortly after Gene died, her crying dramatically stopped! She would just look around above me and smile and coo. There was such a transformation in her that I knew he was there helping us and that she could see him. I was so grateful and yet at the same time I was so heartbroken. I felt like his love and concern for me was so great that even beyond physical death he still chose to help me.

It was four months after his death that I attended my first workshop where I became exposed to energy, healing and the word ‘spiritual’ took on new meaning for me. I began to take CranioSacral Therapy and other training/workshops in earnest. A new world opened up for me and Mosaic was definitely part of it.

For me, Gene’s death had a sacrificial element to it. Now I know his death was part of his path ultimately but it was also a catalyst for so many changes in my life and in so many other people’s lives that I just know it wasn’t some random event. His death transformed many people in both large and small ways. I think it brought us all closer to our ‘truth’. I am profoundly different due to his death.

I see him in my dreams regularly and I am so grateful for that. He often appears quietly in the background as an observer and then at other times he is the main star. In one recent dream he broke through the window pane of the main door of my home to hug me (we were separated by the door from just below our hearts downwards which I thought was quite symbolic). When I awoke I was sure it had happened for real – I could still feel his energy and love. Then the sadness came when I realize it was only a dream … but then what is real?

I see him everywhere. I see him in every backhoe that goes by (as that was his business) and I always say ‘Hi Gene’ because I feel he somehow puts that backhoe in my path as a way of saying hello to me. I see him in every bird that sits on a wire (everytime I would turn on the radio after he died I would hear the Eric Neville song ‘Bird on a Wire’). I see him in the stars at night and I even find there are moments that I see his face (for the briefest of seconds) in the faces of other people I come across. He is in my heart all the time. Sometimes it hurts and sometimes I find the most amazing peace when I think of him. He changed me with his life and he changed me with his death.

Last issue’s winner of a Quantum Biofeedback session is Ken Von Skopczynksi and this issue please send in your name for an amazing channeling session with Tammy Dodd.

Until next issue.