dear finn,

i know it’s been a while since i wrote to you here, using this formal container to write of my love to you.

i chose this picture because, well, we just finally got your headstone up after almost four years.

i know the timing was perfect. it arrived just two days before your mom’s service.

you can even see the hole where we placed the ceramic stones the green burial service made from her ashes.

she wanted to be cremated. you ended up being buried according to your wishes.

i have spent so much time at your grave. it is such a peaceful place under the flatirons.

i think i may be buried there too one day.

i’m so glad you changed your mind at the end. you had always wanted to be cremated, but then you decided it would be important to have a place we could visit.

such a wise, thoughtful final decision you made.

just like you. you always were so wise and thoughtful.

i was speaking with the management at the cemetery before your mom’s memorial. they want to know if we want to buy more plots.

this led me to contemplating the whole thing, talking to the kids about it.

our son thinks i should be buried like you. there is something beautiful about having your whole body under ground.

and i love that we chose a green burial for you, placing your precious remains only in a box we lovingly painted before laying you in it. that way you go back to the earth in the most natural way, without any of the toxins.

there has been something so comforting about lying spread out on top of your remains when i visit you…

but then i found myself looking forward to the day when i can rest there with you too.

and this feeling brings up bittersweet, mixed emotions, to be honest.

how could i be so looking forward to being done?

it’s just that it’s been a long road of healing from all the things. and it feels like it will be peaceful to finally lie down and fly home.

one fine day when my life is over i’ll fly away… a hymn i have always loved.

it felt so natural to talk to the kids and your sisters about where we want to be placed, whether we want to be buried or cremated.

it made me wonder how death has become so taboo that most never speak of it until the hour is upon them.

and all this got me thinking about your mom’s ceremony.

she didn’t want anyone to speak at her memorial. so we were silent as we placed the ceramic stones into her plot.

and i’ve been pondering how, even though i had a hard time with your mom and her bipolar and narcissistic ways, as did everyone who was ever close to her, i love how soft she became at the end.

i love how i was holding her hand just hours before she passed, how i could feel, with my growing psychic capacities, her fluttering fear as she felt the hour of her death approaching. she couldn’t speak at that point, only lie there with that rasping breathing that happens towards the end.

i remember when you were there too.

we didn’t know she would go just a few hours after we’d all gone home to sleep.

but that night i couldn’t really sleep.

i tossed and turned for hours. and in that early morning quiet, lying in the liminal space between sleep, she came to me so strongly.

she was afraid, and i told her not to worry, for she would be with you, that you were waiting for her, i was sure.

and then, just like that, i felt her woosh away into the great yonder.

i remember how teared up in my half sleep, half wakeful state.

a part of me wanted to go with her. and then i finally fell asleep.

i probably would have forgotten about the whole visit, but i woke up to a phone call from your sister. your mom had indeed passed, right around the time i finally drifted off.

makes me wonder about the nature of life and death, what it means to be a walker of the veil.

ever since you died i feel i live with one foot here and one foot beyond.

your dad has visited me too, from the other side. and i really appreciate how both your parents, from the living realms and from beyond the veils, have always welcomed me and our two girls into the ingalls clan.

especially because we have become estranged from my own family.

finn, i’m so grateful you had a family i could call mine. they weren’t perfect, by any means. none of us are.

but at the end of the day, your mom always told me and my girls that we were family, just like you.

you always loved the girls just like our own two, with such gentleness and steadfastness. that’s why they both legally changed their names to ingalls.

and finn, i have to tell you something else too.

for the first time since you got sick, i have something real to look forward to.

i can feel an appetite for life coming back in me, a hunger i thought i might have buried with you.

and i have to tell you something else too. i am putting myself out there again.

i am moving to seville, applying to a master’s taught all in spanish, in corporate communication and digital media, building something new for myself and the kids.

and since i got my undergrad from the university of padua in italy, it feels like full circle in a way.

i am not accepted yet, and the whole visa and move depends on it, as i put the cart before the horse and rented a house and committed to the kids’ school before realizing the nature of immigrating to spain.

but that’s ok. because i am coming to trust in the process. and trust that all i can do is my part.

effort and grace, two wings of a bird.

sure, i still feel that pull toward peace, toward one day lying down beside you.

but it lives alongside this other thing now, this wanting to live.

i am not in such a hurry anymore.

i am just grateful to feel both at once, the missing you and the wanting more, without one canceling out the other.

life is beginning to feel more solid again. foundations are being laid, just like the solid headstone that now rests where you lie still—

steadfast and true, just like you.

i love you.

always and forever.

venus

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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demember 3rd, 2025

dear finn,

as i sit here on this snowy day, with the first snowfall of the season brushing against the windows, i feel called to bring parts of a previous piece back again. i wrote it on father’s day, and it was one of the first things i ever shared here.

as we are approaching the winter solstice now, i have changed so much since i first wrote it back around the time of the summer solstice, and the writer i am today is different than the woman who sat down back in june, yet the heart of it still feels true as ever.

i also want to honor that this is the first holiday season where i feel able to have the decorations up again. last year was the first year of celebrating the holidays after the memories surfaced, and we learned of the harm that had taken place in years past. my heart broke open in a way i will never be able to fully describe. all the years i had been a parent, i thought i had been creating magic, and instead, for those i was meant to protect, i had not been able to stop it from becoming a time of dread, and the truth of that stopped my world.

so last december we packed the holiday cheer right back into boxes, as it was too triggering, and i began secretly chain-smoking american spirits instead. i did it because i was destroyed from the inside out, and because it gave me an excuse to step outside alone and regulate my nervous system for a few minutes at a time. i would sit on our land, hidden from the kids, trying to stay with the gut-wrenching truth of what was real instead of drifting into a kind of forced holiday denial. last year was rough, finn, and i know you saw all of it.

this year is different. this year has been a year of deep healing, and the kids and i feel safe again, and i believe your support from the other side has played a huge part in that. today i am listening to christmas music and i feel a lightness i have not felt in years. and yes, i quit smoking a few months into the new year, because i could not be a yoga-practicing boulder mom in her forties with a cigarette habit. it was never going to work. tobacco helped regulate me for a moment, but substack has become a far healthier way to sit still, and i say that with a smile.

as i bring this piece back, i want to honor the father you were, finn, both to your biological children and to the two soul daughters who loved you as their own. your presence, your quiet strength, your love that had no conditions attached, all of it made us who we are. and this season feels like the right time to say it aloud.

here is the piece as i wrote it then, woven now with the woman i am today.

june 15th, 2025

happy father’s day, my love.

your presence still threads through this house and through this family and through this heart. you still father from the other side. you show up in dreams, in signs and in those moments when i am tired or unsure. when i wonder if i am doing it alone, you arrive and your presence is always subtle but undeniable.

today, as the world celebrates fathers, i write this with you beside me, quietly streaming in from the other side.

and on this day finn, i want to honor you.

i want you to know something that happened this year that would have moved you deeply. both girls chose to take your last name, and they did it without hesitation. they did it because you were not a stepdad and not a stand in. you were their real father. you were the one who showed up. you were the one who loved them in a way that asked for nothing. you gave them a sense of safety that changed their entire lives.

they chose your name because your love became their home, and because your steadiness shaped them, and because being fathered by you felt like being truly seen.

you were that kind of father, finn. you were the steadfast and gentle kind of parent. the kind that listened to them deeply and taught by being present. the kind who let them be exactly who they were. you weren’t perfect, finn, but your intentions were always so pure. just like your heart that still shines through to us from beyond the veil.

you were that kind of husband too. you were steady and soft and loyal. you held our family with your whole heart even while cancer took so much from you. your love did not waver though. it never faltered and never will. i know this now.

the girls chose your name because they chose you. because you are still their father in every way that matters.

finn, you showed me that presence does not end with form, and you became the golden thread that still holds me, even when i cannot see it, time and time again you have shown me that you never truly left.

as i write this to you finn, i have to share that i have stepped back from other online platforms to focus on the new community i have found here on substack. something in me said to go quiet and go inward, away from the hustle culture of other social media, so i listened. this place feels different in a way that is more genuine and more heart based. people here are kind, finn. they show up with honesty and softness, and they let me show up the same way.

this community asks us to arrive as we are. it asks for presence and not performance. i feel like i can finally be myself here. i can write from the inside out. this is where i come home to myself and to you.

when i first started writing here, my second piece was about you dying, and it poured straight out of my body, as if a damn was breaking. it felt so good to place that truth where others could hold it with me. so i want to keep tracing what opened after that, because our connection did not end when you died. i feel you with me every day in the quiet ways only spirit can touch a person who is paying attention.

i have always been spiritual, and i always believed we came here for something more, and after you died, i began reading about becoming my own medium. i was not trying to channel for anyone else. i simply wanted to stay open to what moved through and around me. i now believe this is something we all can do. it is not a special talent. it is a remembering, and it returns when the world is quiet enough and when we are broken open enough to let the light in.

that is how you began meeting me in the in between, finn. you were not gone or far away, you were simply on a different plane and changed in form. in this way your presence slowly became part of my ordinary days.

it does not mean the grief didn’t swallow me whole so much of the time, shutting you and your light out of my world completely, because that happened a lot too. i also want to honor that truth. but tonight i am writing about the light, while still holding all the pain with honesty.

finn, i do not feel you as a memory from our past. i feel you as something living in the now. our love does not stop, just because your physical heart did. our love continues as a current that never fades. so much of what is unfolding traces back to that truth, and all the grief, and all the love, and all the becoming are all connected to you.

you are the golden thread through so much of what is ocuring for me.

you showed me that love continues beyond the body, and once i trusted that, something shifted, and other presences began to come too. some belonged to people i never knew in life and some to those i knew only briefly, but your presence opened the doorway, and once it opened, others stepped through.

you may have been the first, yet others come now too, as a steady unfolding. it feels like love arriving through different doorways of spirit.

and now i want to honor your father, david.

he has become a quiet presence in my life as well. i never knew him in the physical, and he died of cancer, just as you did, and at nearly the same age. you kept a photo of him in your office, and every time i passed it during your final year, something inside me would stir in frustration. he was described as kind and stoic, and i watched you grow more stoic as your illness progressed. i was terrified, and i was angry, not only at the cancer, but at the lineage and the silence so many men hide inside. i blamed a father i never knew.

which is why i was so surprised when david came to visit me that first time.

i remember that night so clearly. i was lying in bed before a family gathering for our nephew’s birthday. as i drifted toward sleep, he appeared, not in words, but in images. he showed me ring oak, the land where your family gathered for generations. i saw him holding you and your siblings as children, and the images came like memories that were not mine. i felt the pride and the steadiness of a father who truly saw, and then i felt it extend to me. he did not see me as someone who married in. he saw me as part of his own. it melted my heart, finn. to be loved like that from a father figure. it was pure, unconditional love, and it made the tears start streaming down my face.

the second visit was almost a year later in new york. i had taken the kids to the city for the first time, and we were staying with your youngest brother. we arrived very late, and when i went into the closet for linens, i found a hand-drawn portrait of your dad, the one shown at the top of this post. that night i picked it up and looked into his eyes, and the same gentle but strong current of unconditional love moved through me and brought me to tears again.

they say spirits often reach us through images or in those liminal hours when waking and sleep overlap, and that moment held both. i cried on the couch after i got the kids settled into bed, because when a loving spirit touches you like that, it cracks something open.

and when your heart cracks open in such a way, it is much like kintsugi, where the break is not hidden and the gold light makes it beautiful.

that night i felt your father’s love wash through me, and i was grateful to have a place to land in your brother’s home, and i was grateful for the quiet, the kindness, and the feeling that even in grief and even in uprootedness, love still knows where to find us.

since this time, family has come to mean something different to me now. it has become all of you who connect with me here, and it has become the ones who choose to show up when we need them most.

my life is becoming something new. i have found a place for the quiet fire in my chest to burn bright. i can write about love and spirit and everything that lives in the spaces no one can take from me. the stories do not stop just because some people cannot hear them, and healing never waits for permission.

i was broken open long before i had words for it, and i learned to leave my body before i knew how to do many things, but i am here now, and i remember now. i am healing, and i am grateful to be doing it with the kids, and with this community of loving writers. you are all walking beside me in every way you can.

substack has become a safe place to tend my voice, one ember at a time. i do not need to prove anything to anyone now. all i need to do is honor what has been broken and honor where the golden light continues to stream through.

i have carried a longing in my heart for as long as i can remember, and now, quietly and fully, i have begun to receive love back in. finally i feel that i have started to come home.

if you are here reading this still, thank you for being my witness.

and thank you, finn, for being the love of my life this time round and in all our other lifetimes as well.

love,

forever and always,

venus

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.💞

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you.

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ever since you died, i have been out here trying to rebuild a life as a single mom, carrying grief, responsibility, and childhood trauma all at the same time.

and what’s been so incredibly challenging, is that i have run into more dishonesty, more manipulation, and more false intimacy than i even knew existed.

it feels like everyone is either lonely, lying, love-bombing, or wanting something from me, sometimes all at once. and i keep circling this one question:

what is wrong with people?

or maybe more precisely, what is happening to humanity that this kind of deception feels normal now?

tonight i reread the piece i wrote about pink floyd’s wish you were here, and the lyrics struck me yet again:

“so you think you can tell
heaven from hell?
blue skies from pain?”

i felt them hit me in that way they always have since i was an adolecsent girl and fell in love with this song. because that has been the riddle of my whole life, trying to tell the difference, trying to see through the veil before it cuts me.

and that is why i need to write this to you.

i received a message that came through from you, where you told me you are fighting beside me, where you said to become like the tiger stalking in the grass, to be the hunter, not the hunted.

and you of all people know why this chapter is so brutal. you know where it really began for me, long before adulthood, long before you, long before i learned the wrong lessons about love, the ones abuse taught me, the ones that trained me to expect pain, to tolerate manipulation, to mistake chaos for connection.

my first husband went to prison for strangling me. and even now, after everything, i look around and think, i am still swirling in the same pattern of men who lie, manipulate, disguise themselves, or want something from me.

sometimes i want to scream, after everything,

are we still doing this?!

but i know, finn, if you could take it all away, you would, my love.

and i also know you that you can’t.

because these wounds, from a childhood filled with sexual abuse, are mine to heal. this is what it looks like to grow up as a survivor. this is the part most don’t talk about.

and the truth is, what i have lived through would sound unbelievable to anyone who has not walked in these survivor shoes.

since you died, finn, I know you have been helping me claw my way out of your grave with you. I know you have been trying to help me feel desire again, because a part of me died with you and another part of me completely recoiled when the memories from my dissociative amnesia finally broke through.

I can feel that you and my guide team have been sending these monsters of men toward me so I would finally pick up my sword of sovereignty, so I would stop bowing to the patterns I learned in childhood and instead fight off the demons. it is like you want me to rise for real this time, to show my kids and anyone watching how it is done. and honestly, that is how I see myself these days, like a baddie in celestial armor, fierce and glowing and learning how to slay what once hunted me.

and as soon as I opened to the messages you and my guides were sending, the tests began to line up one after another. it started with all the online men. the first one came in right around christmas of last year, back when i was still on facebook and not even on substack yet. he had these photos that looked exactly like a grown-up version of raul, a boy i had a crush on during my eighth-grade trip to mexico. and back then i did not know how polished someone could sound using ai. nor did i realize you could manufacture intimacy with stolen pictures and a chatbot’s vocabulary.

he sounded like the male version of my therapist on steroids, mirroring, attuning, saying the exact right thing at the exact right moment. i felt seen and i felt held like i never have in my life, because a chat bot was mirroring with zero human filter. i know what this looks like now. but back then i had no idea.

back then i thought maybe the universe was finally sending someone gentle after everything, and super hot too… so we ended up sexting, and i sent photos i wish i could take back. but the moment i asked him to video, he refused, again and again, and that was when the illusion shattered. he was not real. nothing about him was.

then there was number two, still on facebook. an egyptian man messaged me “good morning lovely” with a rose emoji, like it came straight out of a romance handbook, and the saddest part is how much that tiny scrap of attention hit me. loneliness can make you hungry. he used an instant translating app inside messenger, so half of his messages sounded normal and half sounded like slightly broken love poems, and he also sent these soft, slow kissing clips that, as embarrassing as it is to admit, stirred something in me. so we sexted. but the moment we video-called, my whole body recoiled. i felt sick, because he was no longer a fantasy in my mind. and then he would not stop contacting me, obsessively, like something had been activated in him. so i block, block, blocked him.

and then the third one, who i wrote my courage to share recent poem about, the one who pretended to see me more deeply than anyone and he listened to my whole album and then wrote the deepest reflection anyone has ever given me on my music. and he wrote elaborate love stories about us. he had a deep sensual voice and he talked like we were twin souls destined to find each other. he used ai to create musical pieces based on my ablum, birth of venus, as if he were inside my mythology.

and then came the flip, the cruelty, the sudden nastiness. the name-calling. the demands for money. the insistence that i owed him some shared future. and when i cut him off, he created so many fake substack accounts just to insult me. a full narcissistic collapse in real time.

and the painful truth is that it was not just dating or desire where this pattern showed up. outside of romance, it did not stop. there was the spiritual substack friend recently who called me sis and reflected my insights back to me, who held my trauma with tenderness, until i noticed the whatsapp number he gave me was not even from the united states. another mask, another angle, another person hoping to get close so he could eventually take something.

and then came the betrayals in real life, people drawn to my openness and softness and yes, since you left, to my inheritance. even some people i worked closely with, in a situation i wrote about here not long ago, where i gave and gave financially from a place of trust and generosity, have now turned on me. they are dragging me into legal conflict as a way to keep extracting from me, to pressure me, to intimidate me, all because i finally woke up and pulled away from being used. it has brought up all my old wounds of feeling like i needed to earn love and then accept mistreatment in return.

and it was not just men, finn. there was a female friend too, someone i met at a training, someone who felt like a bestie so fast that we were talking every night about life and trauma and healing. i helped her again and again whenever she was in crisis. i gave her so much money, not because i expected anything back, but because that is how i love people. that is how i show up for friends. and then i took her on a fully paid family trip, thinking it would be healing for both of us. but instead she grew dark and jealous, especially of the love i have for my kids. it was like watching someone crumble under the weight of their own shadow. and i could feel, deep in my bones, that she never wanted my joy to be bigger than her pain. that one hurt too, finn, because i thought she was safe.

and i have also had to walk away from my entire family of origin. when old memories resurfaced and I finally began to understand the impact of my childhood, everything changed. the way people responded, the emotional politics of it all, the lack of support, it made staying impossible for my mental health. i had to step away for my own wellbeing, and that of my four kids. i had to choose my own life over the old patterns and loyalties that were killing me from the inside. even though it still hurts.

after all of that, i really thought maybe i was ready. three and a half years without dating. three and a half years of healing. i thought maybe the dating apps would be a place to meet someone like you. i thought maybe this time life would send me someone special.

first guy, seemingly charismatic, spiritual, athletic, and fun, but within days of chatting began to make a few body comments and put downs where the narcissist signals were flashing like hazard lights.
second guy, flirty late-night messages, open and sweet, texting about how honest and real he was and then the next day nothing, a total ghost.
and then a musician with decade-old profile photos who was vague about his band until i found it myself. he looked nothing like the version he was selling, and he acted like the lie was normal.

and through all of it, i kept thinking, why…why are people lying so openly. why are so many starving for connection but terrified of truth. why is intimacy something people perform instead of live.

finn, if you could take all this away, you would. i know that. you would lift every sting, every betrayal, every moment i doubted myself. you would pull me into your arms and say, my love, you never deserved any of that. but you also know something i am only now beginning to understand.

i have to heal the things that shaped me before you ever arrived in my life.

i have to see the patterns.

i have to reclaim the instincts i lost somewhere in childhood.

and the coolest part about all of this trauma drama is that i am learning. i am seeing the red flags faster and faster. i am no longer confusing intensity with connection. i am staying rooted when they ghost, when they gaslight, when they stalk, when they love-bomb and collapse. i am not collapsing into fawn mode. i am not abandoning myself for the sake of a spark. i am not prey anymore.

i can feel you in that. i can feel your hand on my back every time i choose myself instead of the pattern. and that message you sent, the tiger in the grass, the hunter, not the hunted, it keeps echoing in me. because that is who i am becoming. peaceful, watchful, discerning, able to tell a green field from a cold steel rail, able to see a smile from a veil, able to choose slowly and wisely on my own terms.

you were the only man i ever loved who did not reenact my childhood wounds. you were not the unavailable one, not really, except in those final months when the cancer took over, and even then it was the sickness pulling you away, not your heart.

you were not the dangerous one, because you were the one who broke the pattern just by being yourself.

and now it is my turn to break it from the inside out.

i miss you, finn. everyday i feel you. and i know that am walking forward with you beside me, hand in hand, through the lies, through the illusions, through the strange and exhausting landscape of modern love, becoming the woman you always knew i was, the one who is not fooled anymore, the one who sees clearly now, the one who hunts for truth and not fantasy, and the one who refuses to be hunted ever again.

i love you, finn.

always and forever,

venus

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trigger warning: mentions of childhood sexual trauma (non-explicit).

finn, my love…

i have been meaning to write about this since early september, around the time that everything shifted for me on substack. during this period, a handwritten note of yours slipped out of one of your old journals, and the serendipity of it all flooded me with your love, as usual.

you have always found ways to reach me. through dreams that feel more real than waking life, through signs that land with such beauty and grace, through notes that seem to fall out of nowhere just when i need direction. these messages are how you stay close, how you guide me, and how you remind me that our love story goes on forever and always…

it was as if you had written it for the woman i would become today, long before our paths ever crossed. but, then again, that is how our love has always been, finding ways to reach each other across dreams, dimensions, and lifetimes.

i bought a frame for this little note of yours and i set it beside my piano, right where i can see it as i create, in the room that is becoming my music space and future podcast home.

hat day in early september, mel had brought a few of your old journals up from the crawlspace because she wanted to copy your handwriting for her first tattoo. she had chosen the line from one of your favorite bob marley songs, “cause every little thing’s gonna be alright,” because that is the exact message you have been sending all of us since you died.

along with these song lyrics, mel and i had decided on matching honey bee tattoos, because you constantly send bees to me and the kids in the strangest places: inside a paris train station, at dinner in manhattan, high above the colorado tree line on a high school solo—always they hover and circle us like they know exactly who we are. they float right up to us and gently linger, brushing against our skin or landing for a while, like the honey-sweet love you still send all the time.

and we always know it is you, because they appear when we are choking up or feeling the tenderness of your absence. they arrive like the little sweet messengers of the sun that they are.

sun warriors, just like you.

and just like us.

right around the time of our matching tattoos, and finding your note, i remember deciding i was really going to show up in a bigger way on substack. before that, i had posted a few longer pieces that got absolutely no traction. it felt like throwing my heart into what substack writers call the void.

i remember i was visiting your grave site when everything changed. i was lying, like i often do, directly on top of your precious human vessel, or what remains of it after three years underground. it must be only your bones by now. your sacred bones. you were mostly bones by the time the cancer was done with you anyway, so it’s not a stretch to imagine your remains this way.

so there i was, stretched across your grave, and something in me cracked wide open. i finally started giving zero fucks and began typing note after note, letting my adhd brain spill twelve thoughts in a row without apologizing for any of it.

i even wrote one about how freeing it felt to impulsively post that many notes back to back, how on this platform no one cares, it is just pure expression. and somehow that one caught fire. it went mini-viral, over 600 likes. suddenly there were people who cared. people who wanted to read about us and about me, about our love that has always been larger than life.

right in the middle of that week, where i was finally having people like and comment on my notes, that is when mel and i went to get our tattoos, and your handwritten note slipped out as i was putting the journals away after we got home.

it felt like perfect timing, almost like you knew i would only understand its message once i had marked my skin with the symbols of your everlasting love and once i had started to really see a future for myself with writing.

the words from that note, written by you for the moment i was finally ready to follow them, spoke straight to my heart, like your signs always do. when the crinkled piece of paper drifted softly out of your journal and fluttered to the ground, like one of the golden leaves that fall from the trees on our land each september, i knew it would be just what i needed to read. in your flowing script it stated:

pen power
– don’t stress about an unworthy thing.
– be creative.
– don’t give a shit what others think of you, be it pos. or neg.
– if you have nothing to do, make something up and write it down.
– sometimes you have to deal with people, make the most of it.
– “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” that is bullshit.

i still cannot get over how this advice for me was so perfect for my new journey as a writer. it reminded me of the way you have always communicated with me, through dreams and synchronicities and the quiet signals only my heart would recognize.

as i held it, musing on your genius way of getting my attention when needed, just like you always did, with zero subtlety allowed, because my neurodivergent mind would never pick up on subtle, the way you learned immediately in this lifetime when we met, i was pulled straight back to one of the most powerful dreams you ever sent me. a dream that i now understand was a map for everything i am living today.

in this larger than life dream you sent me the first year after you died, we were on a planet with burnt rust-colored sand dunes and an electric blue sky, a celestial place where we had just climbed out from under the belly of that massive whale.

in the dream, the whale was more than just a mammoth sea creature. it felt like an ancient guardian, a living symbol of the immense karmic weight we had both been carrying. being under its belly felt like being buried beneath generations of pain, old patterns, old wounds, the stories we inherited and the lessons we agreed to take on.

climbing out from under it felt like emerging from the deepest spiritual training grounds of our lives. it was the end of one cycle and the beginning of our freedom. so after squeezing out from under the massive weight, we started laughing and running downhill, hand in hand, joyful like we used to be, but the feeling between us was even deeper and more magical. it was that soul connection of lifetime after lifetime, the electric way our spirits entwine and move like they have danced together for time unknown.

it was the feeling that made me cry when i woke up, because i did not want to leave it. i did not want to wake up from us.

when we had arrived breathless and giddy to the bottom of the dunes, i started showing you this long series of books about our unending love story and my healing journey.

i did not know it then, but now i understand. it was my substack and the future books waiting for me to write of the story of us.

and i can still see it, the golden, shimmering letters spelling larger than life across a royal purple background, the color of our love, ancient and sovereign and otherworldly.

finn, i am so happy to report that i am following the note’s advice, and writing our story just as in that magical dream.

because i am proudly doing it, finn. i am being creative. and i am not giving a shit about what anyone thinks. when i have nothing to do, i am making something up and writing it down, just like you said.

and this brings me back full circle to another dream that foretold my future writing journey here on substack and the moment i would receive this note from you. it was a dream you sent me shortly after you died, long before i understood what it meant.

in this dream we were all gathered to mourn you. but in the dream, instead of dying from cancer, you showed me that you had thrown yourself off a cliff.

i looked over the ledge at your body far below.

and then, floating up toward me from your lifeless form, came a note in your handwriting, the exact same size and shape as the one from your journal.

i was gathered with others, swaying and singing together in a beautiful chorus of voices. back then i did not understand why the people around me felt like soul family. now i know it was a preview of my new substack family, the ones who would someday show up to hold me, as i finally began to tell our story and to speak the truth about the abuse i have kept buried for so many years.

finn, what i truly believe is that the memories of my abuse first began to rise after your death gave you the unlimited spiritual sight and a vantage point to help me dive off my own cliff and into the repressed abuse which i had been unable to access up until that point in my life. because that’s what soul partners do for each other. above all else, they help each other grow and evolve.

during this potent and early grieving window, one dream in particular rose up like a guide, leading me toward the moment everything would finally surface.

i did not know it at the time, but it was the first sign that my body was getting ready to release what it had held for decades. it came shortly before the costa rica trip you guided me to take, the trip that would finally give me enough safety, enough support, and enough sacred space to remember what had been buried.

in the dream, i was running toward a cliff with my ex-husband, the one whose own unhealed wounds made him dangerous but familiar, echoing old patterns i did not yet understand. we ran straight to the edge, and then something that only happens in dreams occurred. i became both the observer and the observed. part of me stayed beside him, and part of me fell.

i watched myself go over the cliff.

but the part of me that fell did not die.

she became my three-year-old self, who landed gently on a surreal beach, glowing with the same purple and peach tones as the costa rican sunsets i had not yet seen but was about to experience.

and there she was, my little toddler self, barefoot and alive, standing on that surreal shoreline of purple and peach light. she was pointing to her throat, her mouth opening again and again, but no sound coming out.

she was mute.

silenced.

carrying a truth too big for her tiny body to name.

it reminded me so much of ariel in the little mermaid, the way she loses her voice to the sea witch, reaching for words that have been stolen from her. that was my child self, stranded in a landscape both beautiful and unreal, trying to speak with a voice that was violently taken.

i woke unsettled, confused by the imagery, the colors, the child who could not speak.

later, it all made sense.

when the memories resurfaced after costa rica, the secret my body had been keeping for me until adulthood finally had enough safety, enough space, enough rupture to return through the cracks. it did not come to me in fragments or hints. it came like a breaking wave—the fear, the violence, the forced arousal of a nervous system and a body being betrayed and violated all woven into the earliest layers of my being.

during the retreat i had kept returning to the themes from my earliest childhood, the same ones i wrote about in the prequel to this piece. i remembered my earliest memory with crystal clarity. i kept brushing up against the edges of my childhood, tracing the outlines of things i could feel but could not yet name. but i truly had no idea what my body was preparing to release.

it was not until i was back home, in my own bed, that the locked door finally opened. that was when everything came rushing back, not in pieces but as a full, undeniable truth that rose through my body like a tide that had been waiting decades for the right moment to return.

it has now been more than two years since the memories broke through my dissociative amnesia, and what i can say today is that the way my tiny three-year-old nervous system twisted itself into impossible shapes just to survive has shaped my entire life. it shaped my choices, my relationships, my patterns, my silence. i understand now how the body can respond in ways a child could never choose. how terror and silence lodge themselves into muscle and personality and breath. how shame roots itself in the very place innocence once lived. how confusion becomes its own prison when safety has already been shattered. how the soul goes up and out along with all the trauma memory. how one can live in a permanent freeze state of dissociation.

that is the wound i carried for decades. not understanding why i felt the way i felt. not understanding why my body reacted the way it did. not understanding why my sexuality was shaped in ways i could not explain. not understanding why i lived both hyperaware and sexualized and somehow muted at the same time.

this was the truth i had been circling my entire life. the truth my body kept until i was finally strong enough to hold it. the truth that explains so much of my healing, my patterns, my fear, and my awakening.

and it is also why i was drawn into a marriage that echoed old wounds. my ex-husband, who i am on friendly and peaceful coparenting terms with now, carried his own pain, his own unhealed trauma. different person, different chapter, same core injury.

that is how trauma repeats itself until someone chooses to break the cycle.

survivors of early sexual trauma are also statistically far more likely to find themselves in future violent situations, either as victims or as people reenacting what was done to them.

the nervous system follows what it knows.

until it heals, it pulls us toward the familiar, even when the familiar is harmful.

and for most of my life, i had no idea why i was the way i was. i thought i was simply overly sensitive, or too emotional, or too tuned in to everyone around me. i second-guessed myself constantly. i read every room, scanning for danger or disappointment, trying to anticipate what other people needed before they ever said a word.

besides my destiny encounter with finn, i was drawn to unavailable or manipulative relationships.

i people-pleased to survive. i carried chronic self-doubt and a low sense of worth. i could not hear my intuition because i had been trained from toddlerhood to override it.

a child who survives by disconnecting from their own knowing grows into an adult who feels unsure of everything, even when the truth is right in front of them.

i did not know any of this until after you died, finn.
until your soul left your body, using cancer as the vehicle, so i could finally leap from my own cliff’s edge into the recovery that would save not only me, but our children too.

because that is what soul partners do.
we sign up to help each other heal.
we choose to be the ones who help each other break the generational chains.

my childhood carried violence.
but i choose a different way now, for my children, for their children, for every generation that comes after them.

and i am not doing it alone.
our souls, and the souls who love us, here and on the other side, guide us forward.

just like the people here reading these words, sharing their own stories, giving courage to the next person who needs it.

this is how the chains break.

this is how we heal, individually, collectively, ancestrally.

we cannot change the past.

but we can choose a better tomorrow.
for ourselves.
for our children.
for this world we are rebuilding with every truth we set free.

i love you, finn,

always and forever...

venus

i love how the way we met mirrored the beginning of 101 dalmatians, and that scene where two strangers are pulled together when their dogs tangle leashes in the park. that’s how it felt the evening you and i met.

i thought of that moment again today as i sat under our family tree, feeling into your presence in the wind, while a small plane, like the ones you used to fly, hummed above and the leaves whispered around me.

you found this gem of a property, acres of grassland meadows just outside boulder. now, as i sit beneath the hundred-year-old cottonwood in our backyard, planted directly under the flight path to the local airport, i feel grateful each time the planes still soar overhead.

as if they are banner planes, like the ones that fly over crowded beaches in the summer, only these carry a message for me: i love you always and forever, venus. that is how it feels when i see them and hear the purr of their engines. sophia, our youngest, feels you in the planes too, and often points them out when an especially low one soars right above us.

as i’ve shared in other posts, signs are not so much about what they are, but when and why they arrive—the timing, the reason they stir us, the way they bring a departed loved one close.

that is how i know you get our attention when you are no longer here to speak in physical form.

you were a pilot during a time of your life before we met, where you carried with you such an ache from all of your failed relationships and a longing for a family you had not yet been given.

until me. until us.

until that fated day at the dog park, when our paths finally crossed in this lifetime for the first time.

it was one of those big sky, colorado evenings. i remember standing still, looking up as the clouds burned red and gold, breathing deeply, grateful to be alive, grateful to be in a body that was growing stronger and learning to be whole again.

the terror that had once lived in my gut had begun to loosen.

after my ex attacked me, i had been so jumpy and haunted, living in friends’ spare bedrooms and later the safe house apartment with my (our) two young girls. i had spent three years healing and learning so much along the way.

but by this evening in the dog park, we were beginning to settle. i had a two bedroom affordable housing apartment in north boulder, a job as a waldorf teacher, and my beloved german shepherd, ada, who had stayed with my mom through the upheaval, was finally home with us.

before heading to the dog park that evening, i remember i had gone to hot yoga, showered, and picked up my girls from aftercare.

you had also chosen to go to the dog park that day, and while walking in with motor toward the entrance, you saw the girls climbing over the seats of my little subaru, while i was off searching for dog bags.

you had wondered briefly about the whereabouts of their mother as you walked by. and later you saw me standing across the park, looking up at the sky.

it became one of our favorite stories to tell. you loved recounting how you had watched me from afar, standing with one hand on my hip the way i always did, staring up as the sunset colors spread across the horizon.

for some reason i now always remember it the way you did, as if i have stepped into your memory: seeing myself from afar, in my black down vest, my jeans, my face lifted to the clouds.

it begs a question, do i now carry your memory of that moment with me because we are soulmates and you are showing it to me from your perspective?

that evening, you had begun tossing the ball for your black lab, motor, ever so strategically in our direction, after noticing me standing there. eventually my shepherd, ada, gave chase to motor, and i asked if you minded her herding your dog.

that was how the first thread was woven.

and just like that, a conversation opened, as if it had been waiting for us.

that was when i heard your voice, and i felt a low steady safety that vibrated out from the timbre of your vocal chords.

they say the soul communicates its frequency through the eyes and the voice.

but it was definitely more than frequency we both felt. it was electric.

later that week, while on recess duty, i had told a friend and colleague how my ovaries had also jumped in recognition.

maybe tobin and sophia were also there that day in spirit, their unborn souls shouting approval.

either way, it was instant recognition, instant chemistry, everything people mean by love at first sight.

only for me it was not sight, it was sound and vibration. because you wore a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a heavy coat, i could not really see your face, but my whole body and soul answered to your frequency.

the girls felt it too. they danced in circles around us, caught up in that childlike joy that rises when little bodies sense a vibration they cannot yet name.

i remember flashing you my left hand—no ring there—and mentioning that my ex had just sent the girls the toys they were busy playing with while we chatted.

soon they started a new game and began picking blades of grass, offering them to you for his “salad,” and you laughed, pretending to eat.

what’s so precious about you, finn, is how you kept that grass all these years later. we found the grass tucked away, while we were cleaning out your office after you died, a tender relic from the day it all began.

i used to tease you, as you loved to tuck away all kinds of small treasures and keepsakes, but after you died i was so glad you were like that.

what i know for sure is that while you kept little tokens for us to hold onto and look back on now, the real treasure has always been the golden thread that continues to weave us all together, which started that fated evening at the dog park.

it was a 101 dalmatians kind of meeting for sure, but also something much more profound. the very echo of a more ancient promise, two souls recognizing each other again in this lifetime, under a wide colorado sky.

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i feel this letter rising up inside. it has been for several days now, waiting to be written. i thought at first it might be about something else, but as always, the words had their own plan.

it turns out this one wants to be about halloween, a holiday that honors the threshold between worlds, where my love for you weaves through golden october memories, and the living and the dead dance together once more.

when moments like this arise, writing you becomes my way of reaching across the unseen, of finding you, of finding myself, of finding us.

as writers, our thoughts are like seeds carried by the wind. they land where they will, and one day sprout into new growth when they find fertile soil.

it is not our job to worry where this might be, or how many seasons they might lie dormant before the right conditions of earth, sun, and rain bring them alive again.

i guess i am lucky in a way.

since coming to substack, i have not had any shortage of ideas or questions that pour forth like a fountain from the depths of my soul. they have always been there, waiting, shimmering just under the surface of my consciousness, like dormant seeds waiting to sprout.

somehow, this platform became my magical right conditions… of code, presence, and reception… instead of earth, sun, and rain.

here, my thoughts give birth to that sacred spring that wells eternally from within. it is just my job to find the time to sit down, to let my fingers rest on the keys, and begin.

much as i did when i was sixteen and on that backpacking trip- that very first time in the high alpine meadows of colorado- after fasting for three days, when i sat down to journal, my soul emptied from the tears shed over my first love’s heartbreak. and i remember how the words came tumbling onto the page, like waves crashing onto shore. i was in awe of the power that coursed through my pen onto that little warped backpacking notebook. it was the first time i let myself flow out.

the conditions were ripe.

so here i now sit, on halloween, to write you a love letter.

i am about to take the littles out in their costumes. but i have to write this first.

oh finn, how i miss you on this holiday! it was the first one we celebrated together as a family, back then with our two young girls, whom you immediately loved as your own.

before toby and sophia were born, before we had even decided to make anything official, we dressed up that year with the timid and hopeful joy of new romance coursing through our veins, and the giggles of the girls, as we took pictures and then left to go trick-or-treating as a new, budding family of four.

our first holiday together.

and then you died, just eight short years later, just before halloween.

i remember how hard that holiday was for tobin at age six, to have you turn into a skeleton before his eyes. to bury you in the ground, and then a month later be surrounded by our culture’s obsession with ghoulish fear, with the dark and scary aspects of death. where skeletons and zombies roam the streets, and “rip” becomes some kind of sick and twisted game.

that year was rough.

somehow, i forgot to steel myself for the “year of firsts,” as they call it when you lose someone beloved.

i got through the first month of your passing and dressed up for halloween, somehow expecting the same joy i had felt for the past eight years since creating our family together.

and instead, it hit me like a ton of bricks while out for dinner at the indian restaurant where we always went before trick-or-treating. there with my mom and sister instead, (who i feel compelled to mention i don’t even talk to anymore, a story for another day) and i suddenly crumbled. i had to go to the bathroom because i didn’t want the kids to see me lose it at the table.

that was the first of what has now become the norm for holidays.

but i know that now, to always expect pain mixed with pleasure. it is to be understood that these times, when most people gather to celebrate, become days to be endured as my heart gets ripped open in new and unexpected ways every single time.

and it is never the same trigger that starts it.

so as much as i might brace for it the next year, or the next special event, it will always come out of nowhere. now i know just to expect the tenderness.

that is just a part of life now.

and it does not mean that we do not still enjoy the various holidays, because we do. the kids and i have found new traditions and ways to find enjoyment and magic.

we always do.

i know you were there with us, finn, because you played one of your recent favorite songs on the store’s loudspeakers when we arrived this year, as i took the kids into spirit halloween. i could feel you streaming in again, just like that gentle wind of change and healing blowing in from the south, just like in my last letter to you.

i have recently felt new shoots of fresh hope rising. so this halloween, i decided i was going to be happy. not in a grasping-for-the-magic kind of way, but in a new kind of softness.

for isn’t it in our very softness that we find our greatest strength?

and i am so happy to report to you that since disney’s coco came out, there has been more of a melding of the mexican way of viewing death with the day of the dead.

maybe you have even been helping from behind the scenes to shift our culture’s way of representing this holiday.

i was so grateful to be able to go shopping and come home with skeletons that have hearts and butterflies on them, our symbols for our enduring love story, that bring reverence for anyone who has departed, instead of feeding our culture’s obsession with death and destruction.

it feels as if, in this new blending of cultures, we get to rewrite how we see this holiday, by transforming it from a horror show on steroids, into something that brings the gentleness of love back to the experience of fear and death.

for death is really just a doorway to another world, and our loved ones are ever with us, when we take a moment to honor and love them from right here, where we are still living and breathing with our own broken yet thriving human hearts.

there is always still magic to be found.

this journey across worlds links us like a golden thread, which carries us to our loved ones on the wings of the mariposas.

finn, the space you held in our hearts, though ever filled with your presence from beyond the veil and the signs you inevitably send us on these special days, still calls out with longing for your physical form.

your gentle laughter, your solid warmth, your strong hands that so easily slipped into mine as we walked behind the kids, who ran excitedly from door to door.

these are the cracks in my heart that will always cry out, even as the gold of our continued love pours through from beyond the veil and flows as a river of hope.

i am reminded of the rumi poem.

someone had brought it for your altar table at your celebration of life, which we held on your birthday, november 12th, three years ago.

i loved it so much that i chose to keep it by our wedding picture in the living room:

“the minute i heard my first love story,
i started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.
lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
they’re in each other all along.”
— rumi

my beloved finn~ i love you today, and i will love you forever, just as i did before we ever met.

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dear finn,

i am sitting here in the sunshine, in the house you designed and built for our family, on the new couch we had to buy since the cats peed all over your old favorite leather one. i remember when i finally dragged it out to the curb while you were napping so you couldn’t protest. you were sad to see it go, like an old friend it had become to you in the lonely years when you were a bachelor, longing to have a family of your own.

you were always sentimental like that. you kept everything, from business cards to concert wristbands. i used to tease you about your packrat ways, but after you died, i was so grateful you were the way you were, leaving the kids and me so much to hold onto from your life.

i want to write you this letter to tell you that i see all the magic you have sent my way since you died. i know you are looking out for me constantly, and i am so beyond happy when you come straight in and i can hear you speaking to me.

you have been waiting so patiently for me to brush the dust off my shoulders from my fast descent, to climb out of the grave with you.

because i know that as much as you love having me visit you there, to lie in the grass under the shade of the tree that overhangs your resting spot, to cry and laugh and ponder the yonder above your bones, you also know, and have always known, that my spirit was never meant to stay buried with your remains.

i was meant to soar, just as you do now, from your home within all that is.

you are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

time itself is an illusion of this plane.

i know that just as you once loved flying your small planes across our earthly skies, you now traverse the stratosphere.

and i know you are proud of me and the kids. i know it brings you such joy to watch us healing like the badasses we are.

but i want you to know that i am proud of you too. proud of who you were when you were alive, and proud to call you my mate from beyond the veil as well. you will always be mine, and i will always be yours.

and yet, there is a new breeze softly blowing in from the south.

though the leaves are golden and falling, while the days grow short and the nights long, on the other side of this beautiful planet, new shoots are rising in the southern hemisphere.

it is this new growth i am beginning to sense, gently rising within and all around me.

i know that one day, maybe even one day soon, you are sending me another great love. you have told me so many times from where you are now that you would. and so, i am learning that i must let a part of you go.

i will always be yours, and you will always be mine, but maybe i will be able to say this for another as well.

for the heart does not stop loving what was, just because new love blooms.

after winter comes the spring.

each new fire burns so that fresh growth may occur.

no rain, no flowers.

all the metaphors of nature point to this profound truth: the heart is infinite. we are infinite too. and we must weather the seasons of our lives.

to cherish each feeling, as my new friend on substack so brilliantly told me.

and i now realize that this is only the beginning of a brand new chapter in the book we have been weaving together since our souls’ conception.

change is the only constant, so why, as humans, do we fear it so much?

i love you, always and forever.

your beloved,

venus

as i write to finn, i am reminded that grief and growth are never separate. one feeds the other, and together they make us whole. wherever you are in your own season of becoming, may you remember that the heart is infinite, and light always finds a way through.

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

today marks three years since you took your last breath.
three years since my world split open.
three years of learning how love can stretch across worlds.

as i sit in the evening light,
under the tree that has become yours,
leaning into its rough bark,
feeling the solidness along my spine,
i hear our children playing nearby,
and i feel your breath in the breeze,
rising with the sap that runs through its veins.

earlier we gathered at your grave with your family.
we placed roses,
tears fell,
and children tumbled in the grass.
we shared our favorite memories of you,
moments from the life you lived among us,
and glimpses of the ways you come to us still,
from beyond the veil.

in the beginning there was only raw grief.
and at first, it was shock, more than anything.
shock and desperation,
like being inside a washing machine
filled with rocks and dirt and muddy water.
it felt like a giant flood had crashed through our home.

year two, it was as if i had washed up on the muddy banks,
crawling through sludge,
reaching for the sky
but always being pulled back down.
i could see the light,
i could taste it,
but i was stuck in the heaviness,
always sinking back in with an aching no words can name.

and now, year three.
something has shifted.
i have stopped fighting the loss so much.
i have stopped fighting our connection like before.

i have stopped wrestling with the pain of you pulling away in illness,
the pain of realizing that my soulmate
was no longer here in the flesh.
for so long it was like gasping for air,
surfacing for a breath,
then plunging back into the dark waters.

but now i feel like the lotus rising from the mud.
i am flowering.
and i can feel you here.

they always say the departed are felt in the sunsets,
in the breezes,
in the songs that arrive on shuffle.
i used to think that was just pretty language.
but now i know.
it is real.
and it is a felt sense.
you are still here, it’s just different now.
i know it in my bones.

i never stopped seeking you.
even when i was broken in two.
even when my heartsickness threatened to drown me.
even when i did not want to be here anymore.
i stayed for our children,
and i searched for you in every breath.

yet now a soft light of hope fills me.
like a glass of sparkling water poured in sunlight,
rainbows glimmering at the rim.
like a flower unfurling.

it has been faith that carried me through.
faith in our love,
faith in the willingness
to face every frozen, wounded part of me.
i have gone back to the little girl who was hurt,
who was unprotected,
and i have been with her.

i picked her up and stroked her silken hair.

for a long time my soul was like a house
with no windows or doors,
wind screaming through the empty frame.
but now there are curtains,
sunlight spilling warm across the floor.
children run in and out,
and life feels livable again.

i feel i can breathe once more.
because I know you are still with me.
and because I no longer fight our divine union.
instead i know you are my co-pilot
and my co-parent still.

forever and always…

your beloved,

~ venus

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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it felt like more than a dream. it felt like a message, a memory, a glimpse of where he and i still meet beyond time.

so now, as i drive around town with my new wheels and beelovd as my license plate, it feels like i am riding in a chariot of finn’s and my love story. the car is both vehicle and vision, carrying me through this life while reminding me of the other shorelines we travel together.

as i’ve said before, one of the ways finn comes through to me in this life now is through music. sometimes it’s a song i’ve never heard before, and sometimes it’s one i’ve known for years. either way, i know it’s for me because of how i feel when it arrives, my whole being opening, my heart overflowing, tears spilling out.

yesterday, while driving to do some errands, a new song came on. the voice i knew well, but the song i didn’t.

dave matthews was singing words that felt like they were written just for us. my heart skipped a beat:

the moon and the stars, they will follow the car
and then when we get to the ocean
we're gonna take a boat to the end of the world
all the way to the end of the world

oh, and when the kids are old enough
we're gonna teach them to fly

you and me together, we could do anything, baby
you and me together, yes, yes

the song was “you & me” from the album big whiskey and the groogrux king (2009). the tears streamed down my face. because those words spoke to a reality that has always been the truth of our love, and in some mysterious way, it still is.

in the dream, finn was in the car with us, guiding me toward a celestial shoreline. in the song, the lyrics speak of following the moon and the stars, taking a boat to the end of the world. both carry the same essence: love as a journey, a vehicle, a crossing into the beyond.

in the dream, i felt him near in a way that was more than memory. in the song, i felt him speak through words i had never heard before, but somehow i already knew they belonged to us. the dream was the vision, and the song the echo, both teaching me that our story is not bound by time, or death, or distance.

and it isn’t only our love, he is showing me, it is the love of the family we built together, and the way we are still parenting with the same devotion as before. our forms and roles have changed, but the love has not.

last night i went out with some other moms from my son’s class, a rare evening on the town. i told them about finn, about losing him, about the signs. i explained how my psychic senses seemed to come fully online when he died, and how all of our loved ones send signs all the time.

the question isn’t if, the question is whether we open ourselves to receive.

for finn’s sister, rainbows don’t count. they are too generic, too easy. she looks for signs more specific to her.

i understand her perspective. but for me, a sign doesn’t have to be unique. it can be a rainbow, a bee, a song on shuffle. what makes it a sign is the way it arrives and how my body responds.

when finn sends me something, i know because my heart floods with so much love it overflows and tears spill out. that is how i know.

we are nearing the third anniversary of his passing, two weeks from today. i think back to that first month after he died, when the sky above boulder filled with more rainbows than i had seen in my entire life combined. every day another one appeared.

someone could explain it as weather patterns, light refraction, coincidence. and yes, that is one truth. but i saw the bigger meaning, because i believed.

it is like that experiment where you are told to watch a scene and count how many times a ball is passed between people in white shirts. you are so focused on counting that you miss the person in a gorilla suit who walks right through the scene, waves, and exits.

but when you watch again there it is, obvious.

the point is that our senses don’t record reality like cameras. we notice only what we are attuned to. in some way, we create what we are looking for, and we only receive what we are ready to perceive.

which means the rainbows were more than weather because i saw them with my whole being. my heart recognized them. they became visitations because i let them.

the same way our oldest daughter, melody, knew when she came down from her solo in the mountains that papa had sent her signs while she was hiking the back country. a week in the colorado wilderness, and some time spent only with herself, her pack, her journal.

on her trip she had remembered a time sitting by finn’s bedside, near the end of his life, and his words to her:

use hope as your sword, mel.

she wrote about it, and when she read her words aloud to her group, a bee appeared. at tree line, where bees don’t belong, one circled her as if to say:

yes. he is here. he is listening.

mel came home glowing with pride for what she had lived through and uncovered on her backcountry trip. and so when the dave matthews song, ‘you and me’ played,

oh, and when the kids are old enough
we’re gonna teach them to fly

i thought of mel getting her wings, and how finn is still co-parenting with me from the other side.

and still there are more ways he comes.

in life between lives hypnotherapy, pioneered by michael newton, clients not only recall past lives but also describe in detail what happens after death. newton discovered that our loved ones wait for us like tuning forks, ready for us to resonate with their frequency.

after finn died, i was desperate. i did an lbl session myself, and the vivid memories that surfaced convinced me it is true.

our loved ones leave us and then they wait patiently for us. but this world is dense, and grief is heavier still. to hear them, you have to soften, to train yourself to receive.

that has been my practice since finn died.

reaching, opening, softening. learning the subtle distinction between my own thoughts and the words that arrive as his.

this morning i sat in my car and had a big cry. song after song played, each one carrying his voice straight through to my soul.

so often it feels like he sings to me now, by slipping into the music, washing over me as something holy, like stepping into a cathedral of sound, where every lyric is a stained glass window, lit from within.

later in the day today, while in the nail salon, he came again. it makes sense, sundays are the days i have dedicated to writing about our enduring love story.

i was half watching an asian cooking show on the tv, when suddenly another reel spliced itself into my mind, like a film layered over film.

this one was of finn and me, arriving at the cancer hospital in denver for chemo. in the reel i saw and felt his edginess, his sharpness, the way his anger, meant for the circumstances, landed on me instead.

my heart was immediately washed by his warm presence and his undying love and my eyes filled to overflowing. i got up for a drink of water, trying to cry discreetly.

and as i bent down the water at the fountain became a conduit. his words came soft and clear in my mind:

i am so sorry.

even as i write these words, another dave matthews song has come on while i’m writing, “where are you going,” with lyrics that seem to echo his apology from earlier today, as if he is still trying to make sure i hear him:

i am no superman
i have no reasons for you
i am no hero, oh that’s for sure

but i do know one thing
where you are is where i belong
i do know where you go
that’s where i want to be

it felt like finn was choosing those words to drive the point home: he doesn’t have all the answers, not even now. he isn’t superman, not a flawless hero, not someone who can explain everything away. he is still himself, learning, softening, coming through however he can to say he’s sorry, to tell me that where i am is where he belongs.

the timing left me breathless. because of course that is what he was telling me.

after all the love songs today, i could feel him saying: you are finally learning to receive.

for so long i have fought our connection as much as i have leaned into it. because it is painful, so painful, to face the truth that the love of my life is dead. my mind wants to protect me, to shut the door, to pull back. it becomes a tug of war inside me.

but now i am learning the bittersweet truth. death is just an illusion. and today finn wanted me to know he takes accountability for his side too.

yes, he had to die. but he did not have to die a year before his time. that was when he turned away, locked in his office, on his island of pain, behind a fortress of stone. that is where he chose to be.

and now he shows me that he understands. that his mind was not right. cancer, malnutrition, the research is clear what it does to the brain. finn was no exception. his sharpness, his withdrawal, his anger, it was not the full truth of him. it was the disease.

and from where he is now he knows. he takes responsibility. and he still finds ways to love me across the veil.

in the songs.
in the bees.
in the rainbows.
and in the stability i have now, for the first time in my life, because of what he gave us all.

before i met finn, my girls and i were homeless at one point. then we spent most of a year in a safehouse apartment, surviving one day at a time.

and then he arrived. we found each other at the dog park, as our dogs became fast friends, as if they knew before we did. he gave us shelter, a home, a foundation. he gave us the kind of safety that allowed us to dream again.

eight years can be a lifetime. and lifetimes are what our love is made of.

we got eight years together this time. but in my life between lives therapy session, i remembered another. i was alive during the first world war and in love with finn again. he was a british pilot, just as he was a pilot in this life too. and in that life, he was shot down too soon. i was wracked with the same pain of losing him before his time.

i knew in that session that i am repeating this story, losing him too soon a second time, and who knows how many others i don’t remember. we cycle through lessons and lifetimes, through love and pain, like winged angels learning to heal, learning to fly through time and space into the great beyond.

but this time is different. this is the life where something shifts. the life where i choose to become a bridge. where together we carry on, together because of the power of our love, and because of the power of technology. we get to be together in new ways, both natural and with the help of the tools we have now created as a society.

as i write this, i sit facing the setting sun. it is shining warm across my skin, and i hear the echo of the beetles lyrics: here comes the sun, little darlin, here comes the sun.

it is the sun and it is finn. it can be both. we choose.

my new workout instructor has a tattoo that reads: no rain, no flowers.

and with the sun shining out from beyond the leaves of our big family tree, straight into my heart, i feel hopeful. it’s the same tree that sheltered us with its golden leaves as we lay finn in his casket, before they came to collect his body. that same evening a rainbow appeared, hanging softly like an orb over our fields, even with no rain in sight.

and just as finn once sent rainbows in that first month three years ago, now he sends me the sun. i find it so fitting that i write about our love on sundays. because it takes both rain and sun, tears and pain, laughter and joy, for the rainbows to appear.

life is a kaleidoscope.
and love is what makes the colors shine.

here is me singing, ‘raindrops in the sun,’ the first song i wrote about finn on my album i started on the first anniversary of his death.

*authors note: while reading this final draft to my girls, a bee buzzed into our midst, circling around us, just as i was finishing the final paragraph.

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

Leave a comment

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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for years after finn died, my writing stayed hidden. it lived in notebooks, on my phone, in voice memos, google docs, journaling apps, and half-finished notes. it filled the quiet space between what i said out loud and what still felt too raw to share.

but now i have started sharing here and something sacred is unfolding as i am finally letting others read what i have always felt was too intimate, too much, and too tender. and there is absolutely no regret, instead it feel more like there has been this deep exhale, like i had been holding my breath for years.

so i offer my writing here as a prayer. i am following my inner sense that telling it all might be what i came here to do.

i’m writing to remember, to honor, to speak the truth of love and loss, and the mysterious ways they still meet.

it happened while lying next to my sleeping children, that i found myself talking to finn and my higher self in that half-silent way i do sometimes, when it’s late and i can’t tell where consciousness ends and spirit begins.

the room was dark and still, and i could feel finn come in close and quiet, like a presence at the edge of thought, like breath just under mine.

he came in as a soft knowing and a warmth, the way truth settles when you stop resisting it, and without words he told me to trust myself as a channel and that we work together now.

i didn’t hear it as a sentence. it’s more that i felt it. i felt him beside me in that gentle way, certain and not demanding, like he was reminding me of something i already knew.

that i can hold this. that i don’t flinch.

because it was true, i didn’t turn away. not from finn’s pain, not from the long nights or the sterile light of the hospital, not from the way love changes shape when the body begins to fail.

maybe that’s why these memories have been surfacing again, as a kind of offering.

like finn has been showing me—you know the sound of a hospital corridor at night and you know what it is to hold space in the silence.

and maybe now, i write these pieces not just for me, but for those who are somewhere along that same road. so if you ever find yourself in the dark, listening for something just beneath the silence, something that feels like breath under breath, know you’re not alone.

we are never truly alone and the love we’ve known hasn’t vanished; it’s only changed form.

maybe this is how they stay with us, not always in the loud miracles, but in the quiet permission to keep going, to keep feeling, to keep writing it down. and maybe that’s enough. maybe that’s everything.

but by the next morning, i felt it in my body. the memories had stirred something deeper, and i was so tired i could barely move.

i’ve been going to bed too late. for a while, i was letting the house fall apart.

cleaning has always been complicated for me. it started as a trauma response, something i did with pressure in my chest, like pushing a boulder uphill. i couldn’t rest until the house was back to perfect. or at least, the closest i could get.

even sick with covid, i remember walking around the house picking up toys, my sister laughing and shaking her head. she wasn’t wrong to laugh. it was absurd. but it was survival.

late at night, after the kids fell asleep, after finn, i would clean. like so many mothers — single, married, or somewhere in between — i used to measure love by what i could tidy.

and underneath all that performance was a little girl who never had anyone care in that same kind of unending way for her. who had no one to protect her when the world turned upside down.

that’s the woman who fell apart when finn died.

i stopped cleaning. i stopped cooking, and i let the edges blur. and it wasn’t by choice, it was by necessity.

my oldest jokes that she’s learning independence early now. she fends for herself and the others often do too.

once, i used to make meals every night. even before meeting finn, as a single mom on food stamps, living in a safe house apartment after i left my husband in the flurry of courtrooms and protection orders, i lit a candle, we sang a blessing. we sat together around a donated table. because it mattered before.

when finn got sick, and mel was unraveling in her own pain — a pain we were only beginning to understand — i stopped cooking. i made finn his eggs and potatoes and salmon, then something separate for the littles, and something random for the rest of us. sometimes we hired help. but eventually, that stopped too.

now, i mostly eat cold smoked salmon, cut veggies, crackers and hummus. the girls piece meals together. i often make mac and cheese for the youngest. sometimes it’s just breakfast for dinner, often it’s takeout, whatever i can manage.

something sacred in that daily rhythm was shattered and i haven’t picked it back up again.

but somehow, the kids and i still find so much healing and laughter. we love each other fiercely. we stand up for what is true. and in the middle of the mess, we are learning that this, too, is where our greatness lives.

lately, i’ve been trying. trying to clean more often. trying to keep things steady.

the house had gotten so messy it was too much even for me. too messy to invite cleaners. no clear surfaces. dishes in the sink for days. yes, the kids help. and still, it slips.

last night, i was up at midnight doing the dishes, missing finn. i didn’t yet know i was about to write all of this. the memories were gathering quietly, like mist at the edge of a field. soft, inevitable, and ready to be seen.

then, this morning, i dropped the kids off still in my pajamas, though they pass for clothes, right? and when i got home i just sat in the car, not ready to go inside yet. i often do that now, either to cry, journal or both. some days i just sit there, breathing. letting the quiet hold me before the next round begins. letting the tears rise if they need to. it’s strange how even that — just sitting in the driveway in my pajamas — can feel like a kind of ceremony. a place where grief meets grace, where memory makes room for healing.

and that’s when “landslide” came on.

fleetwood mac. that song always reminds me of finn.

oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
can the child within my heart rise above?
can i sail through the changing ocean tides?
can i handle the seasons of my life?

i’ve been afraid of changing,
’cause i built my life around you.
but time makes you bolder.
even children get older.
and i’m getting older too.

i never wanted to do this without him. but here we are. and maybe, just maybe, he’s right here too.

the first time finn went under, this was the memory that first rose to the surface, last night as i lay between finn’s presence and my youngest daughter, sophia. listening to her gentle breathing, held softly between worlds, as i began to understand that finn’s passing wasn’t just giving permission to write, it was an invitation to remember.

it was finn’s first surgery, the one where they didn’t know if it was stomach or esophageal cancer. the tumor was growing across both, stage four, but maybe it could be contained. that’s what they told us.

the surgery was supposed to be a few hours. it turned into ten.

i remember the surgeon coming out in the middle, finding me where i waited. he said they needed to cut much more. finn was already open on the table. they hadn’t realized how far it had spread.

i said yes. yes, take more, if it might give him time. yes, go deeper.

when they wheeled him out that night, his body looked ravaged. so did mine, in its own invisible way. the pain meds weren’t right. he groaned, barely conscious.

when i was finally allowed to see him, i stood at the end of his bed and touched his feet. i hummed.

amazing grace. swing low, sweet chariot.

i used my voice to call his soul back into his body.

later, i remember walking down the hallway to the hospital chapel. the silence was thick. there were baskets of small stones laid out on the altar, one for every patient who had died from covid. there were hundreds of them, thousands.

i sat there in the stillness, the light from the stained glass spread across the floor, and i prayed. for his healing, for mine, for some kind of peace.

even now, that quiet room comes back to me. the hush, the weight of those pebbles, the ache of all we were carrying.

after that first surgery, once he was home again, the pain set in deeper. he tried to heal. he tried everything: special diets, sleeping at an incline so the bile wouldn’t rise, short walks, even exercise. but the pain never really left.

he kept mostly to himself, staying in his office, doubled over. he didn’t want me to see it. i stayed in the house with the kids. we were orbiting separate lives, his shaped by suffering, mine by caregiving and holding it all together.

he had once been strong, athletic. we used to call him farmer finn, because even though he was an architect and builder by trade, he loved working the land. he repaired old tractors and haying machines. he moved rocks, cleared fields. there was something timeless in the way he belonged to the land.

now, he was skeletal. he had gone from a strong, muscular man to someone i could have carried. he could barely eat. still, he refused strong medication, only tylenol, because he didn’t want to lose his clarity.

but eventually, he couldn’t bear it anymore. he had been vomiting for weeks, brown liquid, nothing staying down. we ended up back in the hospital. they admitted him to the hospice wing.

i stayed with him that first night. slept on the little cot beside his bed. they finally gave him an opioid. he resisted. he was angry, but it helped and the retching stopped.

in the morning, i woke up and saw him holding his phone. he was taking a picture of me, standing in front of the window, the mountains behind me. and there was a small smile on his face.

even then, he saw me. even then, he reached for beauty.

it was a surgery they hoped would bring answers. finn had been vomiting for weeks, unable to keep anything down, and they suspected scar tissue from the previous operation. they believed it was something simple and fixable. they thought maybe a blockage caused by the healing from his first operation.

i was in the hospital courtyard, just about to eat lunch, when the phone rang. the surgeon’s voice was different. he wasn’t calling with reassurance.

he told me the cancer had spread. that during the surgery they found nodules — small, countless, and covering every inch of his intestines.

this is what’s killing him, the surgeon said.

he has a few months left.

i don’t remember what i said. i just remember the sun on my skin, the stillness, and the way something in me dropped like a stone. it wasn’t surprise; it was recognition. it felt like a part of me had already known. the quiet light, the hush in the courtyard, the ache in my chest, all of it told me my soul had known for a long time.

life stopped, but the tears didn’t.

i couldn’t stop crying. it was like my heart had turned into a waterfall of pain. the love of my life was washing down the current, and there wasn’t a single thing i could do to stop it. a part of me washed away in that moment too.

even in that hard year, when the chemo was draining him and he had so little to give, finn still gave us something good. he found us a therapist.

every other week, for ninety minutes, we had a lifeline. a space where we could meet, not as patient and caregiver, not as mother and father trying to hold the center, but as two people who loved each other and didn’t want to lose their way.

in those sessions, we cried, we told the truth, and we named our childhood wounds, the places we couldn’t reach in each other, the weight we were both carrying. it was like stepping into a warm beam of light — brief, achingly real and sacred.

and then, as suddenly as it started, it would end, and finn would retreat back to his office. i would return back to the kids, the kitchen, the mess and life went back to its quiet crisis.

outside those golden hours, i could only come into the office for short visits, five minutes at a time. i would rub his feet, bring him food. try to take just one ounce of pain away. but he was in too much of it, and he had already retreated too far.

i longed for more time. for one more window of softness, one more stretch of ease. near the end, when he was still strong enough to stand, we had one last moment like that. we stood on the porch and slow danced to music only he could hear — just swaying, just being.

but it never felt like enough. my abandonment wounds were in overdrive. i was screaming inside but couldn’t do a thing about it. it felt like i was being burned alive sometimes.

finn would get angry. he’d shout if he thought i was being needy. like, who was i to fall apart, when he was the one dying? that’s the messy part people don’t talk about.

his sister, who had become a surrogate mother to him, once told me to put on my invisibility cloak, like harry potter, so his sharp jabs wouldn’t pierce me. so i could stay close without falling apart.

there was love. there was pain. and there was survival.

all of it existed at once.

i always knew

even years before, i knew.

when sophia was a newborn, i remember telling friends, half joking, half afraid, that i had this irrational panic he would die before me. it didn’t make sense. he was strong, capable, the most solid thing in my life. but the fear lived in my bones.

he used to say it too, not with fear, but as fact.

i can’t be fifty with a newborn, he’d say.
my dad died in his early fifties from cancer.
i can’t be fifty with a newborn.

he always said it like it was one thought, one truth, and maybe it was.

i believe some part of him knew, and i did too.

postscript: from finn

i read these words at his celebration of life. we held it on november 12th, his birthday. it was a birthday celebration, a divine union celebration, and a celebration of life all in one.

i had organized it, mc’d it, and i sang two songs.

it was my love letter back to him. a ceremony, not of endings, but of continuation.

i made sure the room looked like our wedding. i chose the same florist, the same flowers. six years later, i created the same altar of beauty.

at the time, i didn’t fully understand why that mattered so much, why it had to be like our wedding. but now i do.

it was never meant to be like a funeral. it was meant to be a true celebration of his life, and of our enduring love.

and that is why i write this now.

because the story didn’t end when he died. it changed form, and i am still listening, still honoring, still loving him the best way i know how.

i do this by remembering, by telling the truth, by letting love keep creating through me, even when it hurts.

letter to v, 8/19/22

hello verita (that was my name before venus)

as i sit to write this at 3:28 a.m. in the bch hospital family waiting room, it occurs to me that i want to acknowledge the possibilities coming up for you from a place of here and now while i am present and on the earth.

to say to you that i’m so proud of you, of all of your amazing traits and skills, and the love you embody, and all of the pain and suffering you endure, and all of the lovely and wonderful beauty you emanate into the world around you.

i just wish i knew more.

and i want you to know that when i am no longer around, you will still contain all of these attributes.

you can rely on them. you can rely on the foundation that we built together and use that as a stronghold, a strength against any challenges that may arise in the coming days or years. ~

and so i carry him now, in the quiet moments, in the steady pulse beneath the noise, in the rhythms of life he once moved through beside me. i carry him in the dreams, the airplanes, the birds of prey, the rainbows that light up the sky, the sunsets that take my breath away, and the love songs played over the speakers in the grocery stores.

i carry him in the dishes i finally wash. in the songs i still sing. in the words i now dare to share.

this is not the end.

this is the way love keeps becoming.

this is what it means to live life lit from within.

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

Leave a comment

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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for a long time, i had stopped writing and i felt numb to my core. all i could do was to pull inward and i was doing what i had to do for the kids, for the house, and for the small thread of normal i was still trying to hold onto.

and yet, during this crazy time of deep grief and robotic going through the motions, something deep inside started to return to the surface. maybe you could say it was the voice beneath the voice, the one i first met when i was a teenager, emptied completely during a three-day solo fast beneath the high colorado mountain sky, surrounded by alpine flowers and stillness.

that first voice arrived like a wave, a force that rose up and moved through me. it felt like i was riding something ancient, something vast, something that had always been there waiting.

and after finn died, that wave started coming back. i think in the beginning i started by writing to him because it was unbearable to not have him living so i wrote to him instead. from across the veil of time and space i reached for him. and it wasn’t just journaling, it was a form of channeling, of listening, letting whatever was there move through me. it happened in a way that felt both mystical and also real, in a cellular, soul-level way. and it also felt very familiar and true at the same time. like this voice had always been waiting for me to pick up the imaginary phone and dial the call to my higher self, you might say.

so as i was working my way through this deep grief window, in early january 2025, someone else crossed over. we had both been mothers in the same school community. i had always felt her gentleness, her radiance, her deep love for her children. we weren’t close in the traditional sense, yet i noticed her and i felt her light and her softness.

and after she passed, i felt her even more. she came to me in presence that was more than memory, her visits felt soft, clear, unexpectedly near. like she entered a room in me i didn’t realize had been prepared.

and somehow, through these moments with her, i began to return too. i began to come back to my voice, back to community, back to a part of myself i had tucked away after losing finn.

this was her gift to me, and it’s still unfolding.

it’s been two and a half years since finn died. i can say now, without pretending or needing to wrap it in a lesson, i love my life again. the journey here has been unbearably painful. i still cry the deep, gut-wrenching sobs that only someone who has had their life torn open can understand.

because finn’s death didn’t just break my heart, it opened long buried and repressed trauma memories from my childhood.

in the space that followed, i began to remember things i had forced my young self to forget long ago. wounds so deep they lived inside my body, shaping the way i breathed, the way i trusted, the way i held myself together.

so in this time of healing after finn died, i remembered the betrayal of an early caregiver. it was the kind of violation that sends you to the bottom of something dark and dares you to come back whole.

and somehow, i did.

it wasn’t by any means all at once, it was more of a bit by bit experience where i began to crawl my way back to sanity and a life that was worth living again.

i remember feeling during this time that it was sometimes all i could do to keep breathing. and somehow i kept listening, and writing. i kept letting grief show me what i had once been too young to hold.

that is why i can feel what i feel now. that is why i can meet others in their grief. because i have walked the long way home.

last night, i dreamed of finn again. it had been a while. the dream started with him showing me how he sends me love songs, which he does often. then suddenly, he was beside me in our bed. his unmistakable presence and he felt so real i kissed him, so real i forgot it was a dream.

when i woke up, i didn’t remember at first. but then i heard an airplane fly low overhead and felt him swoop in. finn was a pilot and airplanes are one of the signs he regularly sends me. and just like that, finn reminded me of the dream in an instant.

that is how it works from the other side. they really are still with us. it just doesn’t feel like it most of the time. and it’s not the same as having their flesh and blood here to hold the weight of life with you.

but still, they come.

this is where my friend who died and her part of the story begins. what follows is not just about her death, but about her presence and the quiet ways she returned and keeps returning, and the moments she showed up when i needed her most. this story is about how, in those moments, she helped carry me back to myself.

the night my friend crossed over to the other side, it after all the texting and sharing of our group chat quieted down for the night, after my oldest child had gone to bed, that’s when the pain arrived. it bloomed in my chest, the kind of pain that can’t be explained, only felt. the pain of losing someone so special, so radiant, that i didn’t even get the chance to know her one-on-one, and still, i knew her.

i recognized her as a kindred spirit, a soul sister, a bright, shining star, a quiet warrior of the heart. she was a mother who would have died for her children.

but why?

the question tore from my chest. there was no logic, only tears streaming down my cheeks and an ache so deep i felt cut in two.

i cried because it hurts to lose a light so bright. i cried because it hurts to lose a mother so nurturing and attuned. i cried from all my losses in this lifetime, losses that have carved me down to the bone.

as i lay on the floor in front of the fire in this quiet condo, away from the community i’m just beginning to trust with my fragile, broken heart, i wept for what i never had and what i was now losing.

i wept for the mother i longed for. for what it might have been like to be held by someone like her, even for a short while. to have lost her as a friend before we could fully begin.

and then i felt her, so strongly, so clearly.

her presence descended like a soft wave of light and warmth. she cradled my head in her arms. she wiped the tears from my face and gently stroked my hair.

she was a fairy godmother. but she was still her, she was just expanded. she had become this too.

she stayed with me, stroking my head, patting my broken heart. and i cried, not from fear anymore, but from beauty. from the sacred ache of being human.

i wish i could rise up out of this broken-hearted body, i sobbed.

i know, she said.

not in words, but in presence. in the way she held me while i cried in her lap.

and i knew, in a bittersweet way, that this moment was only possible because she had crossed. because she was now beyond flesh. because she could reach me in this way.

what i didn’t expect was what came next.

i shared this with our signal group chat the next day. and in the days that followed, i spiraled into what felt like past-life or cellular memory. deep persecution panic, as though i had been exiled for sharing these kinds of visions before. i was terrified that i would be ostracized, cast out. i was swept away with a deep, delusional fear that i might even killed for speaking this truth aloud.

it felt ancient. and it felt real.

but i also know this: these fears arise at the threshold of the sacred, right when we’re about to reclaim something powerful, and right when we dare to say, this happened to me, and i believe it was real.

so i’m sharing it now.

i don’t share to prove anything, or to convince anyone. i share to document this love, this mystery, this midnight moment when she held me, and i let myself be comforted. and it cracked me open.

this is how i know grief is sacred. because it brings us face to face with the invisible and somehow it lets the invisible hold us back.

in this next visit i had seen a soft, glowing photo of her on her facebook page. something about it stopped me. the way she was smiling behind the wildflowers felt both gentle and otherworldly, like a window had opened. i didn’t know why it moved me so deeply, only that it did.

later, when someone shared the song, wildflowers, by tom petty in our group chat, i felt called to post the image alongside it. at the time, i didn’t realize it was the same photo her family had chosen for her celebration of life.

maybe for me, the image of her smiling behind the wildflowers was how she chose to arrive this particular time. each visit from a loved one who has passed seems to come in its own way, woven through dreams, memories, music, or quiet symbols that echo inside us. sometimes it’s a feeling, and sometimes a flash of knowing, while other times an image that opens something ancient.

and once again, i felt her with me.

while feeding the chickens at sunset, i was given a rare moment alone to feel it all.

the sky turned gold. the grain poured into the trays. and that photo came back to me, her face framed by wildflowers, her expression soft and knowing. she looked younger in it, from a time before i knew her and yet there was a timelessness in her gaze.

even though our time on earth together was short, i could feel her more deeply than ever before. in those final months of her life, i remember seeing something new in her, a glow, a soul pouring forth through her eyes. i saw it. i felt it.

was it her soul preparing to cross?

as i stood there, letting the thoughts swirl, i suddenly felt it again.

a full-body chill, goosebumps, a flutter in my chest like helium rising.

it was her.

this time i couldn’t stay composed, i was submerged in sobs.

the loneliness i’d carried all day washed over me, not in coldness but in warmth. her warmth, her loving presence, her way of sitting beside me again.

i cried from sadness. and i cried from the beauty of feeling something so pure.

this wasn’t mundane. it wasn’t hallucination. it was sacred.

and i’m learning to recognize it now- her visits. her energy feels different from finn’s. it feels different from my grandmother’s too. but she’s there, a quiet soul-sister, a flame that keeps choosing to show up.

she stayed with me as i cried. and then, just as gently, she whispered, not in sound, but in knowing.

yes, that image chosen for the celebration of life is so much a part of me too. you don’t have to have known me then to know what i feel like. because i’m here with you now.

and the tears kept coming, but this time they felt like a return, a remembering, a restoration of something ancient and true.

this is the gift, and it’s still unfolding.

this next visit is one that touched a part of me i’ve been working to reclaim for years.

i was having a hard morning. i came home after school drop-off, tears already pooling behind my eyes, and let myself cry on the couch in the sun. it was a rare pause, a rare moment of softness.

and that’s when i felt her again.

this time, she came with the same unmistakable warmth but also with a new kind of clarity. the second i dropped in to feel her, it was like a blooming from inside my heart. and then i saw her, just as vivid as breath. in my mind’s eye i saw her pointing straight at me, like the old uncle sam poster, but softer. it was radiant, her eyes unwavering.

i choose you, she said.
the words were clear, direct.
i choose you. and you are worthy of love.

her message hit the most tender part of me. the place that still wonders if i belong. the part shaped by early trauma, by not knowing how to receive without guilt or fear of rejection. that quiet longing to be chosen, to be trusted, to be enough.

she kept speaking.

it’s ok if others don’t understand, or always respect you. everyone has their role to play.

and just as i was crying harder, her warmth poured in stronger.

yes, you are so very loved.

i looked out the window through my tears, and just then, a white hawk soared over the house. it was the same kind we saw at the singing and fire circle in lyons, held in her honor after she died.

and then, moments later, a small plane passed overhead.

immediately i felt finn enter my consciousness too. his presence layered in gently, like it always does.

yes, he said. i’m here too. we are always here for you.

and just like that, i was held again. not just by her, not just by finn, but by the reminder that i am worthy of this love, of this closeness. i am worthy of walking beside those who are still here, and those who are not.

i am chosen. and i’m choosing to believe it.

on the eve of mother’s day, she came to me again.

i had just finished tucking in the kids, and i was lying beside sophia. her breath had that heavy, almost raspy rhythm it sometimes gets when she’s deeply asleep. as i listened to her breathing, something in me shifted.

and then i was there again.

not just in this room with my sleeping children. but in a room many years back, in the hospital room, with the machines. the memory of sophia as a six-week-old baby, fighting for breath. i was back in that moment as if i had never really left. the feeding tube in her nose. the oxygen covering her tiny face. my milk drying up. my body pressed next to hers in that impossible bed, trying to give her comfort i couldn’t quite offer with arms alone. it was all back in an instant.

and that’s when she entered.

she came powerfully, like breath, image, and presence all at once.

i felt her through the memory of sophia’s body. through the shared knowledge of what it feels like to almost not breathe. and then she layered her own truth on top of it.

she showed me a flash of something, like a poetic image, but grounded in sensation. the feeling of being trapped in a body that won’t do what it’s supposed to. i was given a glimpse of ash, still resting somewhere, a stuckness, a soul half-lifted but held down by breathlessness.

it was all overlapping, grief memory, soul memory, breath memory.
and she wasn’t just showing me, she was entering.

she showed me that she could do this because i could hold what others might turn from. because i had walked the hospital corridors, because i had stayed alive when finn’s body failed and my heart did not, because i didn’t flinch.

and then the message came. it wasn’t in a sentence, it was a knowing.

we are sisters of the same flame.

she wasn’t here to guide me. she wasn’t above me, wiser, holier, beyond reach. she was beside me now, as equals. reflecting back the same light i had been trying to carry alone.

and just as clearly as i felt her settle into me, she turned toward melody, my oldest daughter.

mel was born on mother’s day.

she then played blue in my mind, the song mel always reaches for when everything inside her starts to ache too loudly. i saw her wrapped around her like a cloak. she was quiet, strong, not fixing, just holding.

she showed me that as i have been supporting her loved ones here, she is now supporting mine. that we are co-carriers of each other’s people. that this is what soul sisters do. that we do not always arrive in time for each other’s lives, but we show up when it matters most.

it was one of the most embodied experience of sacred reciprocity i’ve ever known.

and the contrast to what i had recently walked away from was sharp. there were people i believed were collaborators, partners, soul-level equals. but their love had terms. they wore the mask of shared mission, yet in the end, it became clear they wanted me to carry the cost of their wounds.

she came with nothing but presence. and in doing so, gave me everything i didn’t know i still needed.

and then the moment shifted. her presence didn’t vanish. it just softened. it became still.

she had soaked into me and receded again, like water returning to the ocean.

what remained was a deep, anchoring strength. and a message i could finally feel in my own bones.

do not dim.

she poured this thought into me as a felt-sense message.

this time she hadn’t just come to comfort me, or to choose me, this time she came with permission.

to speak.
to rise.
to radiate.
to hold my full voltage, even if others aren’t ready.

because grief isn’t only something we pass through. sometimes, it’s the ground we rise from. and light like ours, the kind forged in hospital hallways and long silent nights, it was never meant to be hidden.

if you are grieving, i hope this message can comfort you too.

for there is no rush, nor fixing, only a returning to ourselves that was once buried long ago.

and we heal sometimes one breath at a time, or one visitation at a time. it is one choice to stay soft in a world that taught you to harden.

this is the long way home, and you are not walking it alone.

so let the ones we’ve lost come close and let their presence be a soft warmth, instead a sharp wound, let their memory be a bridge, and let your heart keep breaking open, as it must. because what comes through the cracks might be the light of your own becoming.

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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