Death as a Spiritual Teacher

Wellness Wisdom

Even a Graveyard can be a Classroom.

My spiritual journey was began when I was 13 years old. It was a hot August morning when my mother entered my bedroom sobbing. She told me that my sister, who was only 16 years old, had just been tragically killed in a car accident. By this age I had already dealt with an abusive father, domestic violence, a certain degree of abandonment and neglect, and other abuses born from poverty. When I was, maybe seven years old, my father left my mother with six children, never to be heard from again. Although I had been dealing with those things, I hadn’t yet developed any coping skills for dealing with a tragedy like this. In the wake of this shocking news, I struggled, as you could imagine, with no immediate point of reference for dealing with death, let alone the death of my sister.