In the NOE writing class, I learned to start my writing with a reminder of what my homework is.

My current homework is to feel the support and love and teachings of the Anima in the place where I am retching out my trauma and to bring her presence to the place of fear as I approach the scene of the accident.

I close my eyes and I am in the car, both feet double stomped on the brake pedal. The car won't stop. I feel it's rate of speed diminishing as if in slow motion. All things happening in slow motion. The siren is screaming. Something bad has happened.

I remember the trip down from Boothbay Harbor the night my birth mother was killed in the car crash. I was consumed with guilt. I had left the restaurant where we were supposed to meet. I was impatient, I was angry. Under the anger was the terror of something known. But a big loud NO! sat on top of that. It was a big loud spinning NO. A cacophony in my head; a ceaseless rant of denial. The terror of the girl who refused to believe that her worst nightmare might be true and in fact was.

Arriving at Parkview hospital several hours after she was pronounced DOA, they made me go in to see her dead body. I did not want to go. My memories of these moments are obscured by a loud noise; a whirlwind of screaming voices in my head. In my confusion, I stumbled into the room where her body lay on a metal gurney. There was a crisp white sheet pulled up to her neck, but someone had thoughtfully pulled out her left arm, revealing it so that the family and friends might touch her flesh and know that it was empty. This I did. It felt hard and cold, rigor mortise had set in. It had the same dissociative feel as if I was touching my own arm after it had fallen asleep and I just couldn't feel my own touch. Like my arm was no longer mine, impossibly large and dull, a piece of meat. Terror welled up in me. I look at her face. There was a cut on her forehead. All blood had been wiped away, but the edges were red tinged and I could see a shocking half moon sliver of bone gleaming through the rubbery looking slit. Her hair was thin and looked as if it had gone a little greasy, maybe from what ever they had used to clean her up.

I would find out later that her chest had been flailed and her neck broken in the crash. I would learn that she had been ejected from the Toyota Land Cruiser as it had ended over and over on the road to Freeport, within a couple of miles of where we were to meet. I would learn that the old farmer who had found her in his field said she was still alive and trying to speak when he got there, but that her eyes were distant and she was already well on her way out. No one knew what those last words were.

As I looked at her on the table, there was no particular expression on her face. She was just gone, taken from me again. I could not comprehend these things. I did what I knew best. I ran. I ran into the bathroom and retched into the toilet, ashamed that I had not waited for her, ashamed that I had been drinking on my drive to Boothbay, ashamed that I had lost her. I did not know then how much farther I would run and for how long.

The accident has already happened. What more is there for me here in this place? It is a terrible accident. What else has been lost here? Writing about this, I feel the deep place of grief in the loss. How much I miss this woman who I met when I was 19 and lost again when I was 29. She was my best friend. She carried me in her body. When we were reunited, she loved me unconditionally.

What does it feel like to have the presence of the Anima with me now, feeling into these places? There is deep grief here, pain of loss. But the unconditional love is here too. She has all the time in the world for me right now in this moment. She is not leaving. She is here for me. I feel her hand on my hands now as in the dream that was part of the cluster of dreams around this homework. She teaches me how to spin my wool, as she teaches me about the weave of my life. I realize that she is as real as anything I see in my farmhouse bedroom right now. As real as my dog snoring at the bottom of the bed, as real as my partner twitching in her sleep, as real as the pile of clothes on the trunk, the glass pane in the window, the ticking clock. This is what it feels like to be in connection with the Divine: not alone.