My friend Betty passed into light on March 8, 2013. Since then I have been experiencing, not sorrow, but an expanded sense of silence. I have gone about the last few days touching her absence as if she had left me with a gift.

You see, we emailed each other almost daily, having met on Bernie Siegel’s forum quite a few years ago. I knew that her prospects weren’t good. She had been diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer, Stage III. As we begin to write, she felt free to tell me her hopes for beating the disease. At one point she even said she had “learned her lessons” from the cancer and didn’t think it would recur. And of course it did.

She would write, “You shouldn’t have to go through this with me; you have already been through it twice,” and I would say that I was up to it. And then we would talk about cooking, gardening, butterflies, birds that visited her yard in Florida. We were both honest to a fault and said how we felt about being private people.

She encouraged my writing and always told me the truth. I asked her advice on all kinds of things that went on in my daily life. We joked around and shared our fears of the future. Last year she went to hear John Edward when he came to town. He seemed to avoid telling her anything and I suspect he saw what lay ahead of her.

The last email I got from her showed me that she was growing weaker. She had forgotten someone who we both had talked about. From using her iPad from her bed, she now turned our correspondence over to her son. He was very kind about relaying our messages to each other.

Then last week he wrote to say she was slipping and was now in a hospital bed at home and on morphine. I knew she was already halfway on the other side. I remembered how I had broken down and sobbed when my friend Jeanne died of ovarian cancer. But with Betty, so far it has been different. Such peace is felt.

I am going to post this beautiful image that a friend happened to send me in an email. Let’s just call it Betty’s Rebirth.

Sleeping woman
merges with true nature.
Intangible entangled
with the ground.

Vicki Woodyard
Author, Life With A Hole In It