Letter 1

September 10, 2023

Dear Aimee,

It’s taken me four years to be exactly where I am in this moment.

Four years of swimming in my internal world, my experiences of staying awake to the sensations in my body, to the feelings of immense sorrow and grief. To the primal feelings of terror screaming out from the depths of me. I have only been able to touch this in doses. I’ve had to allow so much time in between the unraveling of the terror I was left with the moment you ended your life.

Losing you Aimee… it almost obliterated me.

There were periods of time I couldn’t be present. My body was there but I was getting tossed around like a rag doll drifting in the collapse of a past reality. My nervous system short circuited. My ability to digest information was operating at a crawl speed. I remember feeling like I had to hold on for my life, to the timeline where I could see myself getting through this experience.

I haven’t screamed from my depths since the moment I heard those words the night you were found. They pierced my heart and severed a reality I’d never know again. The one where I had a sister.

The one where you were still alive.

As I sat in the rocking chair, I urgently handed Sailor to Andrew. I sensed it approaching like a thunderous freight train in the distance—louder and louder, closer and closer. Nowhere to escape, I was in its direct path, feet locked into railroad ties. My body trembled, fight or flight on overload in a matter of seconds.

It was coming.

Dad’s phone rang, he answered, and then it hit — the impact.

The level of adrenaline that shot through my body in that moment projected me out of the chair screaming.

I literally screamed for my life the moment I found out you ended yours.

This reality was so overwhelming that, on a primal level, I knew it had the potential to flatten me completely. Having already lost Mom, Jesse, and now you, every reaction in my body, mind, and emotions in that split second is what I've been tasked with unraveling. This is the trauma, the energetic exchange seeping down the bloodline.

The tears of my sorrow have been swirling within the ocean of my grief, and they now call to be witnessed.

Every single one.

The trauma is ready to be sifted through, energetically metabolized, so I can create the balm of healing and then — the alchemy. What I have come to remember is that I hold the gifts of a medicine woman, one who is able to see in the dark while staying awake to the pain. A deeper embodiment of the medicine woman does not emerge out from within without having had walked through my own death portal. This was an initiation into remembrance for us both. As I hold out my hand, you hold out yours. Life and death, the same thread viewed from opposite ends.

Together we start our dance into movement and it is the movement that changes matter.