10/12/2026
I Can Feel Your Healing
Reiki, my mother, and the crew that came to walk with her on her final Earthly path.
I have already written a tribute to my mother and made a video celebrating her life, one that speaks for all of my siblings. This is something separate. This is about the beautiful power of Reiki.
My mom was a truly spiritual person. She did not subscribe to a religion, but she believed in God and in Jesus Christ as our savior, and she believed in all things spiritual. To her, it was all part of creation.
She was born in 1939, at a time when women did not have the chance to use their voices the way we can today. This - to share her journey's energetic healing be spoke of with love and to share with others the gifts she always felt meant so much is something that is surely bringing her joy as she looks from beyond.
When she learned about my somatic healing and intuitive art studio, she was genuinely excited. She was one of my biggest cheerleaders, and when she learned I was doing Reiki, she cheered even louder. She always told me I had the gift. My mom always believed she was an intuitive herself, which, when we were kids, earned an eye roll from most of us.
She absolutely loved that I was helping women. She had been marginalized in her own life, and she lived through difficult experiences at a time when there was not the help and acceptance there is now. So my taking this path was almost a moment of wonder for her. We lived very different lives, and her joy in this meant so much to me.
When I got to the hospital, the stroke had changed the way she communicated, but she was so happy to see us. Her interaction with us would wax and wane, and at one point she told me she wanted to come to one of my classes. “Mom, no need,” I said. “I’m right here. Do you want Reiki?”
She nodded yes.
She loved it. She tried to smile. She touched my hand. As I worked at her crown and her third eye, I told her what it all was. I made swirls at her third eye and held her crown. I made swirls around her heart and came back to her crown, and she began to call out, “Polar! My Polar!”
Polar was our childhood cat. He passed away some thirty years ago. We asked her if she saw Polar. She did.
Then she called out, “Mom! Mama!” over and over. We asked if she saw her mom, and she tried to smile and kept saying, “Mama.”
I talked with her about Reiki and what a joy it was to offer it to her.
At times she held my hand to her face. It made me smile. I did not feel anxious energy. I just felt… even.
Even. Gentle. Okay.
That was not something I often felt with my mom. Just a gentle caring for, and caring of.
And then she said, “Joe. Baby Joe.”
Baby Joe was my mom’s Chihuahua, her last pet, and he had passed years before. She adopted him from the SPCA in Annapolis, Maryland, even though she lived in New York. I called her one day and told her I had seen him there, and she just knew he was her dog. She traveled to Maryland to adopt him. She loved that little dog.
I find it so precious that in my mother’s time of transition, two of her beloved pets came through to help guide her. My mom was a lifelong animal rights activist. She lived a life in which humans had rarely been reliable sources of love and companionship. So of course, in her time to enter her new era, it was the purest of love, the love of our pets, that came through to walk with her.
And the human soul who came with them was her mama, the person who brought her into this world. My mother had been with her mama at the hour of her death, and now her mama had come for her.
I could see this trio: my grandma, in her forever cat-eye glasses, saying, “Come on, Mar, let’s get going,” as my own mama called out to hers.
I had no doubt Polar was there to walk alongside her and keep watch, just as he had watched over her babies when we were young. He once saved my sister from an attack by a nest of bees. More than once, he came running after me when I was four years old, carting my two-year-old sister, still in diapers, off on a jaunt across our farm. We had slipped out the back door, out of Mom’s sight, to try to go see the horses. Polar wasn’t having it. And he wasn’t about to let my mama take this new journey without his guardian eye.
But what I really saw, and I mean really saw, was Baby Joe, his Chihuahua tail proudly up in the air, happily on the scene to get his mama to where she was getting ready to go.
In that hour, Mom told me, “I can feel your healing.” She said those same words again an hour or so before she transitioned from this world the next day.
I will never forget those words. I will never forget being given the gift of offering my mom some peace, joy, and healing as she made her way, and of opening a pathway for her precious trio of journey partners to come calling on her. What a crew they surely were as they made their way out from the earthly walls of the hospice center.
I did not sleep the night after my mom transitioned. I vacillated between grief and regret, wondering if I had done enough for her comfort, relieved that she was free of pain, knowing she had transitioned, uncertain if she was stuck. It went on all night, until finally, as morning neared, exhaustion took over and I closed my eyes.
I asked my mother to show me, if there was something she wished to show me.
Just the dark behind my eyelids.
And then, from that same darkness, I saw a beautiful violet flame ebbing and flowing, swirling and dancing, with jade-green and gold flecks all through it. It danced in a midnight-blue sky over a black silhouetted mountain range, and I knew I was seeing my mother’s soul dancing freely in the aurora borealis.
Just venturing and seeing as she journeyed to where she was headed. Free of pain. Free of anxiety. No worries about a voice, or the lack of one. Just dancing as a magical violet flame in what worldly onlookers would call one of the wonders of this world: the aurora borealis.
Shannon
