“Do you think I am abandoning you?” he asked as we sat together in his room in my sister’s apartment. He thought he knew what he was talking about when he wanted to talk about my feelings around his impending death. I have to say he didn’t.

What I knew and believed then, in my opinion, would have been too much of a stretch for him. There was too much contrast I think, for me to sit there and tell him about some of the experiences that have shaped what I now believe, and even then precluded the idea of death as abandonment. The reality was, in his 3-D experience, he was being taken out by cancer; and despite his conviction that he could beat it, both of us knew that was not to be.

Long before I ever knew my brother was sick, I had read a testimonial from Kryon (a channeled being) about why one person lived and another died in a family. Kryon had this to say…the one who was asking the questions was the tougher one, and could survive the other’s death much better than the one who had died. It was part of our contract, an agreement before we ever came into this lifetime, about the timing and sequence of death in families.

Therefore, Kryon said, the one asking why from that lonely human place, was the one left behind. The one who died would have absolutely been destroyed had their roles been reversed. I can’t attest to how my brother would have dealt with my death from Melanoma, a singularly horrible and aggressive cancer, but I sure had a hard time being left behind.

However, I was lucky enough to have the belief system in place that I do, and although it was severely challenged, and still is challenged on many levels, it is there for me to fall back on. I believe we survive death, and I believe that we are eternal. I believe that I will see my brother again, and we will know each other. I believe we will sit and review our contract and pat each other on the back for how well we adhered to all the little clauses and nuances we put into it before we came.

We’ll also get to laugh and cry and be joyful about how fully we believed in this illusionary place, and how our spirits have grown. I believe the connections between all of us, everyone we meet in our lives, and everyone we know in our lives, and everyone we love in our lives, are eternal. We are One, as the saying goes, but we are all here to help each other evolve in the meantime.

Unfortunately for me, while I am still incarnate looking out, that means I have had to suffer a great deal of emotional pain around this profound loss. It’s been almost too much to handle. Thank you, God, for waiting twenty years from the time my Daddy left to the time my Jimmy left. Any closer and I would not have been able to deal with it.

If I hadn’t moved to Colorado and gotten some space in my relationship with Jim for a few years, I wouldn’t have survived it, either. If this and that and twenty other things, it would not have worked out so that I could survive. As it was, it seemed pretty touch and go, at least for a few months there. The deal I made with myself in February of that following year, just to try to make it through another year with that loss, is there to remind me how close I came to giving myself permission to break my own contract.

That’s the thing that I never would have been able to talk to Jim about in a way that the man would have been able to fully understand, maybe because I still don’t fully understand it, but it is the kind of belief that comes from a true experience. I knew I was not being abandoned.

When I was a kid having my tonsils out, I almost died from the anesthesia. I remember that experience vividly, like it happened yesterday, and that intensity is what makes me believe it is more than “imagination.”

I remember calling and calling for my mommy. I remember a nurse coming to talk to me as I struggled to live, and telling me that I would be able to see my mommy later. I remember looking up at a window with a curtain, a window that kind of looked like one of those in a basement room, way up at the top of the ceiling with a little gauzy curtain.

Now that I think about it, it could have been any room with a window high up on the wall, but at the time I thought it was the basement. I remember the light and the blue sky, and lying there going in and out of sleep, and I remember the window getting dark. I was taken from that room back up to my hospital room in the middle of the night. I remember both my mother and my father meeting me as the gurney came off the elevator.

The thing that stays with me is the sense that I met with angels while I was under anesthesia. I don’t have many visual memories, but I seem to have a whole bunch of auditory memories. I got to hang around there, somewhere not of this world, just waiting, while someone decided what the heck I was going to do.   I think after a while it was decided that I should go back.

I remember being really, really pissed that I had to return to life in that recovery room. I liked wherever it was I seemed to be. There was no way I wanted to go back to Earthly life. I thought I knew what my choices were, and I wanted to stay in this quiet, otherworldly kind of place. I was just a little kid, but in this place I think I was more. I also realized that if I went back, I would have to stay.

“It’s time for you to return,” said a voice in the seeming darkness. A strong, authoritative but gentle voice. From some person, a soft, glowing sort of person, maybe an angel.

“No, I don’t want to,” I said, but maybe not in words, just a thought.

“It’s not your time.” I was told.

“I’ll just kill myself, then,” I said defiantly.

“You can try,” the voice told me. “No matter what you do, we will just save you. It’s not an option.”

Somehow I knew the truth of what I was told. Did I hear this as actual words, or was this just a knowing? I was just a little kid again, in the body of a little kid, looking up at a nurse by my bedside. The lights in the ceiling were way too bright after that quiet place. Suddenly I wanted my mommy again, fiercely, that minute.

There would not be any escape clauses in the contract, except actual death, and it was not to be by my own hand, no matter how much I was tempted. No, that was a cop out for me, and would mean that I just have to come right back and do it again, anyway. You have to go through all the same stuff you’ve just gone through, birth and being a kid, and you tangle up other people’s contracts, too.

So this is what it would have been hard to tell my brother, while he was sitting there in his cancer ridden body, asking me if I would feel abandoned. I was a human being, yes, and of course on some level I felt I was being abandoned. But I also knew in some other place, some other part of my being, this just wasn’t so.

It’s not easy to think about, I thought of my brother, especially as he was sitting there being wiped out by a disease. A disease it may have been his own choice, now get me straight here, his own SPIRITUAL choice, to suffer. It all flashed before me again, when he asked that question. I heard his earthly voice, the voice of the concerned shrink, a psychologist, ask me that question. He wanted to help me from that place with his own passing.

For that moment I couldn’t answer him. It was almost a shock to hear him ask me about that. The human part of me couldn’t receive what he said. I was both his sister and something more. It was the “something more” that received what he said. I dropped the question. We never talked about it, death as abandonment. We never really talked about death, his death, at all. It was too big, too overwhelming, except for that certainty that came to mind as I heard his voice. We are spirits having a human experience.

What can bother us as spirits? Nothing. We are not sick, we do not suffer, we do not die, and we are always with our Creator as we sit there and contemplate coming here. It’s all illusion anyway.

In the meantime, my dear, dear, wonderful brother, know that my heart is broken to be here without you. Sometimes, in those first few months after you died, it was a struggle to even breathe. There is a gap that exists to this day in my life, though I have found some peace around it. I still struggle with every death; an animal, a friend, family members. It is not easy being human.

But then there is that other part that waits even now, so many years later, patiently tapping my foot, until the day we can be together again.