Children choose their parents because of their journey, not in spite of it, says Lida Ahmady, an acupuncturist and board-certified Chinese herbalist who is a founder of the wellness center De’Qi Health in New York City. “Children are really connected to the spirit world because they just came from it.”
In my third trimester, I started seeing Ahmady, and separately her husband, Junod Etienne, a clinical hypnosis therapist who works often with patients who are grieving. He helped me get a lot of sadness out of my body quite literally: In sessions, tears and fluid would pour out of my eyes and nose and mouth.
Etienne also told me the one thing I desperately needed to hear: “You shouldn’t overlook the fact that it’s very possible your sister was involved in the selection of this soul coming to you.”
It was a Monday night in August when jaimie died. Sol was asleep in her crib. Will was doing dishes in the kitchen. I was sitting in the living room on the edge of a children’s trampoline folding clean laundry.
Will had noticed a missed call from jaimie’s roommate. As he dialed him back, I looked at my phone: Three missed calls and a text message: “Please call me. It’s an emergency.”
That’s when everything fell silent for me.
I saw Will’s lips make out the words, “Oh my god.” I felt his embrace. I tasted the tears that ran down my face. I didn’t move or speak until: “My mom.”
Will offered to go, my mom lived next door to us at the time, but I knew it was me who had to tell her.
I crossed the driveway and stood outside the door of her apartment. I found her down the hall in her office. We met in that room’s doorway, and I took her hand and looked into her eyes. She fell to the ground. Her head dangled as if disconnected. She cried with her mouth open, yet I couldn’t hear a whimper.
At the time, I was acutely aware of this absence of sound, likely because my sister’s entire purpose on earth was dedicated to sound. And now she was gone.
jaimie’s final record for Fly or Die begins and ends with the sound of a church organ. She had nearly finished it, with only final mixing, artwork, liner notes and a few title selections left. Two days before she passed, she and I spoke about it for an hour over the phone; later that night, she forwarded me an email with the most recent notes she had sent to her engineer. Ten days later, the band and I, along with her label, set forth finishing the record to the best of our abilities.
On it, jaimie sings phrases such as “I wish I had the time,” and “The future lives inside you,” and “Don’t forget to fight” on “burning grey,” a “snaking nine-minute punk conga line,” according to Slate. On “baba louie,” which largely celebrates our Latin American heritage, and really my mother, who is Colombian, there are joyful rhythms and dubbed-out grooves as well as, for some, the most telling message of all: “Shoot to score / Should I score? / Shoot, I scored.” After cleaning out her apartment, I found these lyrics scribbled in her notebooks along with other messages like, “when you want to use, play music instead.”
