No More Pain, No More Fear

I was twenty-six days into my practice when my niece Kaitlyn died.

She was young. She struggled. It’s complicated, she was complicated. And we loved her. Fiercely. Who among us can say we know exactly what burden another carries.

Once, when she was about six, she dragged me to the armchair and plopped in my lap with her sticker books. I’m sitting there uh-huh-ing and nodding as she showed me Pikachu and other kid things I had no clue about. She then jumped off my lap and ran to her coveted stash of special stickers. She cut one off with the little kid safety scissors and gave it to me, just for Auntie Tracey. Rainbow-colored letters declared “Girls Rule, Boys Drool.”

I felt seen.

The news came on a January morning, and for hours my mind could do nothing but shriek WHY, as I was in and out of tears. Eventually I sat in my meditation room, mindlessly scrolling the usuals: Raise Your Vibration, Manifest Your Reality. Ugh. Then an image of the divine mother and the word prayer flicked by. I went back…compelled, really, to The Devi Prayer by Craig Pruess. A track I probably would never pick on any other day, but this Sanskrit hymn, melancholy and haunting, matched.

I didn’t try to be still. I let the grief come in waves as the ethereal voice anchored the room. Twenty-one minutes of a verse repeated in a language I didn’t understand. Somewhere in the middle of this Sanskrit mantra, I started hearing my own words: No more pain. No more fear. No more hiding from the light. I don’t know where those words came from. I wrote them down when I opened my eyes. This is Katie’s Prayer.

I got an image of her. Curled up, sleepy, like a kid who fell asleep in the car — with light slowly oozing in around her, so gently that she never had a chance to choose it or fight it. Then she wakes up on the other side, and it’s too late to come back. I don’t know what to make of that image even now. I only know it didn’t feel like something I made up. It felt like something I was shown.

And in the middle of all of it, a flash of Carol. My friend from the hot tub story. A nurturing feeling, like a nanny taking a small hand: she’s okay. She’s going to be okay.

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I spent the rest of the day on the phone with my family, talking, comforting, being comforted. So much to process, to hold. That night I put the Devi Prayer on again, hoping to find that moment of solace, and instead I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed. Every time I settled in, I had to get up for a tissue. I’d focus and breathe and let it come — and bam, overwhelmed. I’d writhe and shake and cry and then slowly calm down. Try again. The wave would rise up through my midsection, hit my heart, and crash.

I started thanking everyone I could think of who had gone before her — my dad, my mom, Carol, Judd, Ramos, Angie, Uncle John — and every name brought the wave back. In my journal that night I wrote: It’s no good, but it is good. Peace Katie. Peace.

The next morning, I wanted to float away and lose myself, but the practice did something different. No energy, no Sanskrit, no images. I came out of my meditation abruptly, eyes just popping open, with one clear thought: I have to apologize to my sister. When Michelle said she would be the one to call the extended family and deliver the news, I had stayed silent. I let her carry it. Not cool. The meditation didn’t comfort me about that. It just told me what to do. I called her and said I was sorry.

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At the time, none of this looked like anything. That week all I could do was be in the moment. Twenty-six days I’d spent practicing exactly that, and then grief made it involuntary. Only now do I see how the practice was working. Revealing the path, providing guidance and messages. If I can receive. If I can pay attention. If I can get my conscious mind quiet enough…something else can come through. Sometimes it’s a prayer. Sometimes it’s a tissue box. Sometimes it’s an instruction to go apologize to your sister.

What I needed to hear, the morning after Kaitlyn died, was that she was okay. That the light had found her. That her pain was finished. Shanti, shanti, peace, peace.

I played the Devi Prayer every day for the rest of that month. I still call it Katie’s Prayer.

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This is the first post in a series on grief. Read the second post here.