How Diane Communicated
At first, in the weeks after my sister's death, I never really knew when she was with me or what she wanted. I would only know when I felt her emotions; those intense feelings that I knew were not mine. It took me awhile to understand and to put them into perspective with the decisions that Bill and I were making about her funeral arrangements.
Diane didn't verbalize what she wanted in the beginning; she used her dramatic emotions. Sometimes there was an outburst of emotions that pointedly made her wishes known to me. Perhaps in the beginning she hadn't learned to concentrate her thoughts well enough to verbalize her wants, or maybe I wasn't experienced enough to interpret them precisely. But she made her wants known, from selecting the cemetery plat that she wanted, to choosing the flowers that would adorn the chapel and her coffin.
Later, under a canopy at the grave site, Diane had looked down on the coffin. She was watching from a high perspective up in the corner. I had seen the scene in my heard, from her viewpoint. Diane was pleased with the turnout of people who came to pay their respects. Many people were there from the firm where Bill worked and she liked that they came.
My sister loved all the beautiful red roses and various floral arrangements that had been sent from all over the country by family and friends. She was loved and the flowers had reinforced that love for her. I felt her pleasure. Diane was truly appreciative.
Diane’s earthly mission, however, was far from over. For weeks and months after her funeral, when she wanted to be heard, she would get into my head. She would literally invade my dreams at night … stop the dream in mid-stream … and be in my face with her demands. Often she interrupted my dreams to inform me of the things that she wanted me to do. Things that she insisted I must do!
After some time, I understood that Diane wanted me to do things for her that she thought would help her family grow and thrive without her being there to oversee them. Her dramatic entrances into my conscious would disrupt whatever I was doing or thinking. To me, they grew to be an invasion of my privacy – of my life. With all of their frequency the appearances became frustrating, but they were something over which I had no control.
Even though Diane may not have approved of it, I had a life of my own. A thriving marketing and advertising business kept me busy and challenged. I had been divorced for five years when my sister died and was raising my eight-year-old daughter, Ronica, in Arizona. I enjoyed being on my own and being single. My older daughter Cammy had begun a family of her own and seemed happy. Life was good.
Not being a co-dependent individual, I enjoyed dating several men at that point in my life. I had a number of friends and socialized enough to keep me contented. As with most of my single friends, I struggled financially but managed to provide a decent income and a nice home for my family. I was quite happy in my little world.
My personal life and a future that was evolving didn’t seem to matter to Diane. She had her own agenda, which included my future. Perhaps she didn’t totally have it formulated at first, or perhaps I didn’t fully understand what it was that she wanted from me when the visits began, but she had her own plan for my future and my life.
I eventually understood the things she wanted from me. Because I felt her emotions, I knew that she meant well but that didn’t make her plans any more palatable to me. However, Diane’s mission was so important to her that she was desperate to get her way. My sister’s demands frustrated me tremendously. In time, my resistance made it all the more difficult for Diane to carry out her agenda.
The seemingly never ending non-verbal arguments between us would take place inside my head – Diane’s demands, and most of the time my reb uttals or refusals. I fiercely resisted that mental arm-wrestling for her to get her way and take control of my life and my future.
Diane had first let me know that she wanted me to team up with Bill and help raise her children on the night of her funeral. Her logic was that I was a single mother and my youngest daughter was still at an age that I could use some financial assistance with her upbringing and education. I didn’t have a man in my life right now, at least not one that she would consider long-term worthwhile. All she could see was that her three youngest children needed a surrogate mother. My sister wanted to make sure that proxy would raise her children close to they way she would have raised them, if she were still alive. That person, in her opinion, was to be me. It didn’t matter what I thought of the idea.
The night of her memorial service, when she first let me know her idea, I had been so physically tired and emotionally exhausted from the funeral that I didn8 0t want to hear anything more from her at all. She had made a lot of demands of me for days leading up to the service. “Just leave me alone!” I screamed at her inside my head. All I had wanted to do was to go to sleep so I would be rested to catch my early morning flight back to Phoenix. But Diane had kept insisting that I listen to her. I had become very angry and frustrated. I kept telling her to go away and leave me alone. But she didn’t – not until I had heard all of her rationalizations. She was as persistent and manipulative after her death as she had been before, perhaps even more so.
It wasn’t fair for her to keep making demands of me. And especially demands that I wasn’t willing to accept. After all, I had my own life … remember?
Diane didn’t appear to me in a ghostly form, or any form, until her final manifestation. But that would be months later -- months that seemed like an eternity to me
