For some reason I’m rummaging around in Mum’s old white bookshelf. I’m unsure why I got the sudden urge to pull books out, quickly scan their covers, and shove them back into the shelf. But then it catches my eye—a small, old, tattered blue-coloured book with a lily flower on the front. It’s my Grandmother Jean’s book; the book she wrote while she was dying of cancer in 1978, when she was only fifty-five years of age with two of her seven children still in their teens and living at home.
My heart stops for a short second. A sigh escapes my lips. Yes, this is what I was looking for, although I didn’t know it until I’m holding her book in my hands. It’s my morning writing time, so I trudge back upstairs, book in tow. I fire up my computer, open my journal, take out my gold pen, and put on my wireless headset so I can listen to Tori Amos’s latest album while I hammer out my morning pages. I like to write stream-of-consciousness before I start on my current project.
Grandmother’s book sits on my desk, to the left of my computer and journal. I glance over it a few times as I pour out my thoughts and feelings and those fragments of last night’s dreams into the computer program I use to write stream-of-consciousness.
I write the last sentence, exit the current program, and then open another program I use to write Shadow Working. Before I begin, though, I reach across my desk and open Grandmother’s book. It falls open at the last page, and the first thing that catches my eye is the final paragraph:
Merrilee (my aunt) knew that her mother was writing a book, and after her death the rough manuscript was found. It is now published, so that as Jean wished: Someone might be helped by it.
These words go straight to my heart and choke me up. A flood of tears; I’m crying over my laptop and peppermint tea. Just yesterday I wrote these words in my journal:
I write to help others not feel alone.
When I’m struggling to have the motivation to sit down and write, or polish a section of work, or continue with outline for a chapter, or share truthfully something raw and real about my past; when I fall into a slump—this is often for me with writing—and can’t remember why I’m doing this. Why I spend so much time and effort on my writing, and why it mostly feels like dragging myself up a steep mountain with a two massive boulders on my shoulders weighing me down, I remind myself it’s because I don’t want anyone to feel alone.
For the first twenty years of my life, I was horribly alone. I don’t want anyone, ever, to feel this way.
You may or may not know this, but my Grandmother Jean features in my book, From Dark to Light. My book isn’t only dedicated to her. I also created the publishing house under her maiden name, Maynard.
Here is an excerpt about her from From Dark to Light:
Nine months before, I’d been hurriedly conceived in the hopes that I would meet my Grandma Jean, who was dying of cancer. She and Mum wanted the three of us to have time together before her departure, but a meeting in this place was not to be. My grandmother died five months before I was born. Instead, we bonded in another way.
In the final stages of her illness, Grandma Jean looked at my mum clutching a list of baby names and told her she only needed to consider the ones for girls. You see, Grandma Jean was a gifted psychic and intuitive. And as Jean left this life and I entered it, passing each other like shooting stars in the night, her knowing I was to be a girl, me knowing we weren’t to meet in “real time,”she imprinted upon me her talents—an array of otherworldly and sensitive abilities. While Jean’s gifts enabled me to carry on her legacy, they would prove difficult for a child to carry.
(If you would like to read the entire chapter, which also includes more about my Grandma Jean, you can download it for free.)
I was born five months after Grandma Jean died, and I remember briefly meeting her in the astral where she handed me some (of her many) psychic and extrasensory gifts. I also remember feeling my mum’s pain and grief about losing her mother. It clung to me in in utero like soiled honey, making my body heavy and sticky.
It’s Grandma Jean that saved my life (literally) throughout my turbulent and difficult childhood, and it was her that helped me embrace my gifts and go on to work as a medical intuitive and healer. She’s the one who supports and cheerleads me—she has from the start, and she always will.
What a delightful and moving surprise to have her book show up today!
I love you, Grandma. Thank you for helping me carry on your legacy and lighting the way for others so that no one, ever again, needs to feel alone in this journey from dark to light.
with love,
Belinda
