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A FRIEND CALLS ME TWO
weeks after Maggie has died. She's one of the most straightforward people I know. She says exactly what she means. Today she tells me, “I'm going to talk and you don't have to say anything in reply.” This sounds really good. I have no idea what to say to people these days, how to respond to offers of condolence, how to answer the question “How are you doing?”

My friend starts talking. She tells me that losing a sister is a tragedy. Before I can respond, she says, “I know what you're telling yourself. I know you're thinking everyone loses people, everyone dies, so what's the big deal?” I start to answer, but she talks over me. “Death is a paradox,” she says. “Yes, it's a natural part of being alive, but it's still tragic. And this isn't just any death. It's your sister. She died too soon. And she had your marrow in her bloodstream. You were as connected any two people could be. Please let yourself grieve. Let yourself fall into a hole the size of your sister.”

As I listen to her, all sorts of reactions rise up within me. Her words bring tears to my eyes—
a hole the size of your sister
. But I also want to interrupt and say, “Oh, it's not really a tragedy, not compared to what's going on in people's lives all over the world.” Then I feel compelled to thank her for calling; I want to shift the attention away from me. But instead of saying anything, I do what she has told me to do. I listen. I take in her words.

As she talks, I realize something important. I haven't seen this friend in a long time. In fact, we rarely see each other. She lives in California; I live in New York. We don't even talk on the phone that often. Every now and then we e-mail. But it doesn't matter at
all. I am eternally connected to her. It's been this way from the first moment we met. We were introduced by another friend, and immediately recognized each other's souls. That's the best way I can put it. I see who she is, and I feel seen by her down to the marrow. And if we were never together again, if another word never passed between us, I would still experience her as a living and breathing friend.

As I sit still and do nothing but listen, I feel Maggie's presence around me for the first time since she died. If my friend far away in California is eternally connected to me, it's not such a leap to believe that Maggie—wherever she is—is eternally with me as well; that our love for each other didn't die with her body; and if I would spend a little more time listening, I might feel her presence more readily.

Before we get off the phone, I remind my friend of the last time we were together. We were at our mutual friend's birthday party—a weekend event held at the ocean. We had left the group and gone to the beach, just the two of us. We swam out past the waves, and for a long time we treaded water, laughing about our messy lives and mulling over the state of the world.

“Remember when we swam out into the ocean and stayed there for an hour treading water?” I say to my friend on the phone. “I like to imagine that's what we're always doing. Treading water together way out in the deep.”

“Always,” my friend says. “I am always beside you. And so is Maggie. She's with you always. Remember that.”

“I know,” I say. “I know she's there, but I sure would like to hear from her.”

“You will. And if you need me, call me at any time, day or night. OK?”

When I go to bed that night, I drop the usual prayer for a visit from Maggie. If she's always with me, then praying for her to be
with me doesn't make much sense. Instead, as I am allowing sleep to come, I just listen. I open my ears, my heart, even my skin. Prayer is not a demand; it's not a complaint either. “Prayer is a wide-open eye in the dark,” the Benedictine monk Brother David says. I had forgotten that. So with every breath, I open myself to the darkness.

Deep into the night I have a dream. I am in a room in a large office building, and quite suddenly Maggie appears. She's young and vibrant and adorable. I run to her and throw my arms around her. I am sobbing. She is smiling.

“But you were cremated!” I cry. “How can you be here?”

Maggie smiles like the Mona Lisa—a mysterious, all-knowing smile. Her eyes sparkle. She doesn't say anything, but her very presence fills me with joy and peace. We stand together, and then, without warning, she leaves through a door that leads to a big room where people are watching a film. I go looking for her. I spot her, in the back row, but when I get to her seat, she is gone. Instead, I find a man there, sitting in Maggie's seat. I sit down next to him. He won't look at me. I tap him on the shoulder a few times. He doesn't turn my way. I desperately want him to see me, but instead he rejects me. And he becomes a mirror for everything that is unlovable in myself, everything I have done wrong, all my mistakes. I tap the man one more time, but he keeps his back to me. I wake up.

At first all I remember from the dream are the feelings of being unlovable and ignored—of my soul being unrecognized, covered by the veils of human mistakes. I lie in bed stewing in those feelings. Who was that man? Was he a composite of all the people I unwittingly stepped on during Maggie's illness and death? Was he my ex-husband and the remorse I trail behind me for the ways I wronged him and he wronged me? Was he my parents? My sis
ters? My friends and colleagues? I enter a maze of guilt, of self-rejection and self-attack. When I get tired of myself, I get out of bed, go downstairs, and make coffee.

I sit at the kitchen table, drinking the dark magic brew that Maggie loved as much as I do. She once told me that she went to bed each night excited about the first cup of coffee she'd be having the next morning. She drank hers with heavy cream and several slugs of maple syrup. I told her that wasn't real coffee—it was melted ice cream pretending to be a drink. As I sip my coffee, I suddenly see my sister's smile. I see her illuminated face, and the whole dream comes back to me. Maggie! She's OK! She made it to where she was going. Now she's ready to communicate with those she loves on this side of the ocean. Or something like that. I don't really know what I am talking about when it comes to the afterlife; I only know that there
is
one and it's something more than our feeble brains can fathom.

In many cultures, people believe that when the dead cross over they become guides for the ones left behind. If you listen closely, the dead will teach you, they will encourage you, they will help you understand why things happen the way they do, especially the things we can't accept.

As I go through the day, I keep seeing Maggie's smile. It lifts a burden from my heart. I feel a lightness I have not felt in a long time. But why did she leave her seat to a man who would not look at me, who made me feel unseen, unloved? What was she trying to teach me? Who might help me figure this out?

“If you need me, call me at any time, day or night,” my friend from California had said. And so I do. I tell her about the dream, and about the man in Maggie's seat.

“Do you think my sister was telling me to work things out with all the people in my life?” I ask my friend. “To have the kinds of conversations with them that I had with her?”

“I most certainly do
not
,” my friend says. “Let me ask you something. Who do you think that man was?”

“I don't know. My ex-husband?”

“No.”

“Maybe my mother? My father? My sisters? All of the above?”

“Nope.”

“Then who?”

“He's you,” my friend says. “He's the part of you who still cannot see your own goodness. He's the part of you who keeps turning away—from yourself, from your soul! You don't need the approval of all those other people. Maggie came back to tell you to approve of yourself—of your real self. Your marrow. Remember? Live from your marrow; give from your marrow. You of all people should know this!”

I laugh out loud.

“What's so funny?” my friend asks.

“You're right. About the dream, about the man. You're right. And that's pretty much verbatim what I said to Maggie the last days of her life. It was her issue to the end—knowing her own goodness, not needing anyone else to know it for her. Knowing she's a perfect match for this life even though she's made mistakes. Joining the human club just in time before she left it.”

“Sounds like she came back to remind you of your own wisdom,” my friend says.

I think of Maggie lying in her bed for all those hours as she was dying, reviewing her life, learning her lessons. How she waited for us to leave the room so that she could leave the world as her own
vibrant self. Now she had come back to encourage me to do in life what she could only discover in dying.

“Oh, and one more thing,” my friend says as we finish our call. “Can we change that image of us treading water? Working really hard but getting nowhere? Let's stop treading water. Let's do Maggie proud. Swim to shore, walk into the world, and live the heck out of this life. OK?”

“OK.”

We end our call and I am flooded with images of Maggie and the way she lived the heck out of her life, the way she sucked the marrow out of her last year on earth. I see her in her gardens; I see her swimming in the stream; I see her working in her studio, baking in her kitchen, walking with her children. And then I see her at the last music concert Katy, Maggie, and I attended together—an Irish fiddle festival in Boston. We went primarily because a friend of mine was producing the concert and he promised us we could go backstage when Maggie's musical idol, Van Morrison, was performing.

As the festival progressed, and the crowd got drunker and drunker, we waited for my friend to escort us backstage to meet Van the Man. Finally, the time came and we filed into the wings of the stage and perched on stools, watching the warm-up act. Alas, we waited and waited, but no sign of Van Morrison. And as the warm-up band—a mix of wild fiddles and screaming guitars—played on, we looked around for Maggie. She had disappeared. Suddenly, Katy pointed to the band. There was Maggie, up front with the head-banging lead singer, his arm around her waist. They leaned together into the microphone, and Maggie sang her heart out to fifty thousand drunken revelers.

Van Morrison never did show up. But now I am happy he didn't. Because I have an image of Maggie I can keep in my heart forever:
my wildflower hummingbird sister, her soul uninhibited, her lively essence flying proud and free. As time goes on, as she becomes less of this earth and more of eternity, this is what I remember most of my sister: her essence.

And what will I remember of my year of living as Maggie-Liz?

Love. Big love. So big that my heart will never shrink back to its original size. Which still astonishes me, because during that year, month by month, day by day, my life shrank—first to the size of a hospital room, then a window seat overlooking a field, then a bed, then a breath and another breath, and then a hole the size of my little sister. But in that shrinking, I became bigger, because I began to use love as the measuring stick. Love makes big from small. Love gives meaning to everything. Love of self, love of others, love of life, come what may. Amor fati, love of fate.

Deep within the heart of the earth and the marrow of the bones is a compass that quivers to the power of love. I doubt the scientific community is going to back me up on this, but that grand unifying force that Einstein went to his grave still searching for? I believe it is love in its many forms: kindness, passion, connection, empathy, generosity, forgiveness, and the guts to tell the truth.

Love is a force—an adhesive force. What keeps buildings and forests, rocks and oceans from flying off the planet and spinning into space? What keeps the elements that make up people and animals from ungluing? A physicist would use mathematical equations to prove to you that gravity and electromagnetism hold the universe in place. But what came before them? What came first?

Love.

Love came first.

MANY THANKS ARE IN ORDER
for the support I received as I lived and then wrote this story. I offer gratitude . . .

To the team of nurses and doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, including Sue Brighton, Kate Wilcox, Steve Brown, Ken Meehan, Elizabeth Bengston, John Hill, Beth Kimtis, and everyone at DHMC who provided such loving and excellent care for Maggie during her years of treatment. And to the Apheresis/Transplant team who took care of me before, during, and after the procedure. To our unexpected angel, Dr. Alexandra Levine at the City of Hope hospital in Duarte, California: saying “thank you” doesn't fully express the amount of gratitude our family has for the way you took us under your wing.

To Oliver Brody, Maggie's beloved partner, and a friend and support to me. To Richard Orshoff for guiding us into the field. To Maggie's friends—a fan club from childhood, college, nursing school, Vermonters and Alaskans, medical colleagues and patients, fellow artists and art lovers, sugarers, skiers, walkers, bakers, and farmers. She sure loved you, Helen Weld, Raine Kane, Sally and Dick Warren, Margie Levine, Tim Rieser, Lisa Merton, Tim Merton, Peter Miraglia, Peter Veitch, John Labine and family, Sarah Waldo, Maia and Hugh Brody-Field, Julianna Brody-Fialkin, Dinah Pehrson, Libby Silberling, Carol Bilzi, Mary Deering, and her tribe of Putney friends and neighbors.

To my blessed tribe—the friends I leaned on while writing this book: Kali Rosenblum, Kevin Smith, Abbey Semel, Ron Frank, June Jackson, Phil Jackson, Marion Cocose, Ken Bock, Cheryl Qamar, Perry Beekman, Dion Ogust, Jeff Moran, Sally Field, Jenni
fer and Peter Buffet, Nancy Koppleman, Pat Mitchell, Scott Seydel, Eve Ensler, Amber Rubarth, Srinath Samudrala, Sil Reynolds, Steven and Lila Pague, Sheryl Lamb, Maria Shriver, Eckhart Tolle, Kim Eng, Corny Koehl, Joe Killian, Jenny Lee, Maggie Wheeler, Isabel Allende, Lori Barra, Dani Shapiro, Jeff Brown, Gail Straub, Loung Ung, Mark Nepo, Geneen Roth, Peggy Fitzsimmons, David Wilcox, Nance Pettit, Jim Kullander, Sarah Priestman, Lee Brown, Linda Woznicki, and Ana Leal. And to my Facebook community: thank you for giving me the courage to be a better caretaker and a more honest writer.

A special thank-you to my soul friend, Oprah Winfrey. The conversations we had during a television interview were the seeds for this book.

To Sarah Peter and Carla Goldstein, sisters from another mother.

To my colleagues at Omega Institute, a deep bow of respect and gratitude to all—too many, past and present, to name. But for being so supportive during the writing of this book, I want to mention a few: first, to the one and only Skip Backus—friend and brother—and to Lois Guarino, Joel Levitan, Carla Goldstein, Carol Donahoe, Jennifer Bosch, Veronica Domingo, Chris Mitchell, Michael Craft, Kathleen Laucius, Sarah Urech, Terri Hall, Holly VanLeuvan, Chrissa Pullicino, Randi Marshall, Chuck Maccabee, Angela Casey, and to the Omega Women's Leadership Center and Family Week staffs, faculty, and friends. To Omega's Board of Directors, for your friendship and service: David Orlinsky, Patty Goodwin, Sheryl Lamb, Manuela Roosevelt, Jamia Wilson, Bruce Shearer, and Katherine Collins.

To Henry Dunow—my longtime agent, friend, brother, handholder, and champion. Thank you for leading me this time to Karen Rinaldi, at HarperCollins. Karen, your superhuman energy, intelligence, and care kept my voice clear on the page. You knew
when to push and when to give space, and you did it all with great humor, skill, and understanding. You're a true ally, as are Hannah Robinson, Lydia Weaver, Brian Perrin, Penny Makras, Victoria Comella, and all the team at HarperWave.

To those who read early drafts of the book, and whose perspective and encouragement made all the difference: Sally Field, Tom Bullard, Henry Dunow, Susan Goldman, Eve Ensler, and Eve Fox. And especially to Kali Rosenblum, who read every word of every version and held my heart through the most difficult times of living and writing this story.

To my teachers, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Pir Vilayat Khan, and Taj Inayat.

And most of all, to my family—my heart, my happiness, my hilarity. My sister Jo once gave me a T-shirt that read, “Careful, or you'll end up in my novel.” Well, dear family, you have ended up in this book and I am both grateful and apologetic—you didn't ask to be related to a memoirist. And so I offer my gratitude to: My beloved niece and nephew, Maggie's children and the loves of her life, Norah and Hayden Lake (and to Chris and Hana, too.) To my cherished sisters, Katy “Sorelli” Lesser and Joanne Case, to Ian Roose and Marshal Case, to my nieces and nephews, and to the extended Lesser/Freeman/Bullard/Rechtschaffen families. To Tom Bullard—for the light you shine on our path, for your uncommon blend of pragmatism, clairvoyance, and comedy, and mostly for the love. You teach me to put love first. To my beloved sons who make me proud to be their mother: Rahm Rechtschaffen, Daniel Rechtschaffen, and Michael Bullard; my daughters-in-love, Eve Fox, Taylor Rechtschaffen, and Rebecca Bullard; and my grandkids, Will, James, Ruby, and those to come.

To the memory of my extraordinary parents.

And to Maggie, always . . .