FLORA

           Today would have been my sister Flora’s 88^th birthday. She was born a year and half before me and died, too young, at 80. I always felt it was a decision on her part, to move on to what she called “the next great adventure.” I’m sure she wanted to avoid the inevitable pain as her cancer metastasized, along with all the indignities of illness and dependency. 

            It seems impossible that she left us, now eight years ago. I have continued to mourn her loss, and have regretted that it took us so many years—decades, really—before we “found” each other. We were separated already very young, sent off before the age of ten to different schools; and she left home immediately after school, first to secretarial college (the fate of girls, back then; I went to Cambridge!) and then to different jobs, mostly in London but including a stint with Cunard, crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners. We did attend each other’s wedding, but she stayed in England while I went off to Germany, Canada, the US. We both had children, both went through the painful experience of divorce. Separated by an ocean and a continent, we saw each other only occasionally over many years.

            We began to find our common ground only in our sixties. She was way ahead of me on the path to a deeper consciousness, a deeper commitment to the life of the heart and mind. For longer than I care to admit, I scoffed at her on the journey she was taking. It was only when confronted with irrefutable turmoil and pain in my own life that I began to see the need for change and found myself at the start of that same journey. For what felt like the first time, we became brother and sister, regretting the geographical distance that lay between us but holding each other more dearly in our hearts.

            As Flora’s birthday approached, I wrote last week to her two daughters, both still in England, and was much moved to hear back from them in long, affectionate emails. Today, the two “girls”—no longer girls, of course, but mature women, each inheriting different qualities from their mother—are on a kind of retreat together in the Welsh countryside, in what I’m sure is a loving celebration of their “mum”. I send my own loving thoughts their way. We share the grief, but also the sense of respect and honor for a life that was fully and diligently examined, a life dedicated to the joy and the mystery of the inner life. Indeed, of life itself.

            I wish that Flora were still here for me to wish her the traditional "Happy Birthday... and many more!" Alas, she's not. But she lives on in the hearts of those of us who loved her.