Chapter 12
by June
The day I received my Purple Paper, I also was blessed with much needed, life-changing peace. I have been carrying around an inescapable heaviness in my heart for years about my cousin Margret’s passing, and the message she sent lifted it from me that day. Ten years older than me, Margret was my best friend and took me under her wing when my mother passed away in 1987. I was only twenty-seven at the time and my mother was just fifty-six. My world had shattered with her passing.
Instinctively intuitive and compassionate, Margret knew how broken I was after my mother’s death and took it upon herself to help me through this difficult time with spiritual teachings, healing, and a lot of laughs. She also introduced me to the world of Reiki. Combining the Japanese words rei, meaning spiritual wisdom, and ki, life force energy, Reiki is a technique that uses spiritually guided life force energy for stress reduction and relaxation and also promotes emotional and physical healing. It is administered by laying on hands and is based on the idea that an unseen life force energy (the ki) flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If our life force energy is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress, and if it is high, we are more capable of being happy and healthy. Reiki and my cousin were godsends for me as I began to heal from the pain of my mother’s death.
Years later, the tables turned and my cousin needed my help when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In keeping with her beliefs, she fought it through natural and holistic ways. I remember celebrating her being five years cancer free. We thought we had conquered it forever!
No matter how hard we wish and pray, some things are out of our control. Several years later, her cancer returned in her lungs. Wanting to make things easier for everyone in the event of the inevitable and no longer being able to speak for herself, she wrote her living will. She let us know that she had signed a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order and made us all understand her intentions. A DNR is a legal order written to withhold cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or life support in respect of the wishes of a patient in case their heart were to stop or they were to stop breathing. Margret did not want to be kept alive should her heart or breathing stop. I didn’t want to think about that, but I told her I would support her wishes.
When that terrible day came, her family fought the hospital and put my cousin on life support. None of us were ready to let her go, but it was not our decision to make. When I went to the hospital, it broke my heart to see her wishes not being met. I sat with her parents, my aunt and uncle, and gently reminded them of her wishes. It was such an emotional time. After some painful soul searching and shared tears, they agreed to disconnect her from life support. Twenty minutes later she was pronounced dead. I struggled with my part in that day and carried the burden and heartbreak for years. When I received a message from her on Roland’s Purple Paper, I knew my cousin was at a place of peace and I didn’t have to shoulder that burden any longer.
I lost my cousin thirteen years after I lost my mother, losing my footing in life too. I found it again on June 5, 2010, when Roland gave me a message, heaven sent. It read, “It’s OK that you pulled the plug. I told you a long time ago—it would be OK.”
