I don’t like small talk, so let’s just dive in the deep end. My sister, Odet died on July, 4, 2014. Rewind to the weekend before, I received a call from my mom on my drive back from Los Angeles after attending a friend’s wedding and was informed the Chemo was no longer going to work. I remember seeing a rainbow in the cloudy sky and then nothing. Frozen! My husband had to take the phone from me to assure my mother I was still breathing, but that I wasn’t coherent. I blacked out in that moment. Numb. I don’t remember crying. It just felt like a scene out of my worst nightmare.

The next few days all I remember is a blur of forms I helped her husband at the time sign, which basically was signing off her to go die. Hospice! All I could think was this isn’t happening, but it was and I did my best to show up for all of it. So my beautiful sister at the young age of 36 was wheeled into a hospice room. I laid by her bedside for the next 3 days, I don’t remember eating or even going to the bathroom. I just stared at her. I prayed over her. I facilitated goodbyes. The gut wrenching one being with her 15 year old son at the time as he recalled everything he learned from her and would not forget as he grows up without her. Tears rolled from the side of her eyes. Her unconscious mind all doped up on morphine to ease the pain, still cried in that moment with her son. She knew.

So with that, I stayed until her last breath and held her hand as she left this physical world. Rewind to months prior, she was in a hospital bed and I was trying to give her a penny for good luck, which she denied. She said, “Sis, you keep it for me instead.” Little did I know at the time that that Penny would later save me many times over. Starting with the day I pulled up to the morgue to deliver her clothes before her funeral and a penny fell out from the side of my driver side car door. I fell to my knees just straight balling my eyes out from sadness and comfort. That in that moment, even though she was dead, she was with me still.

Fast forward to 2019, I have collected every single Penny around me from the gym floor, to the TSA security line, to the fitting room the day before a big job interview, to the couch at work right before a session with a client. In every moment when I missed her so much or thought about her, a penny showed up. Then when my dad passed 10 days after her 5 year death anniversary, now the pennies come in pairs. My husband calls me crazy. Heck, I call me crazy! But I won’t change a thing. For someone who is grieving you hold on to the moments that bring you peace and comfort. You seek to find meaning and purpose in a deep loss like that and I sure did, in a penny!

I hope you find your penny and take pride in appearing crazy to others, because in the end we all are bound to live through our very own real life nightmare one day. The only thing that might save you on any given day when you are living in your nightmare could be a penny.