Marrow Read Free

loneliness, misunderstanding, and disconnection in the world. Connection is a basic human need. We want to be understood, seen, accepted, loved. We want to matter to each other. We want to relate, soul to soul.
    And so I fumbled around, trying to craft a book that could shine a light on the path that leads to the authentic self, a self that defies description yet begs to be revealed. “One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf lamented in her diaries. “Looked at, it vanishes.” Still, I wanted to look.
    WHEN I WON the cosmic lottery and tested as a perfect match for my sister’s bone marrow transplant, I did what I often do when I’m scared: I became an amateur researcher. I do not like to bury my head in the sand. Rather, I like to arm myself with knowledge, even if in the end the knowledge can become its own form of sandin which I bury myself. But in this case, the research I did into bone marrow, stem cells, and the miracle of transplant went way beyond the acquisition of knowledge. And what my sister and I experienced was much more than a medical procedure.
    My research revealed to me that bone marrow transplants are fraught with danger for the recipient. For months after the procedure my sister would face two life-threatening situations. First, her body might reject the stem cells that would be extracted from my bone marrow and transplanted into her bloodstream. And, second, my stem cells, once in my sister’s body, might attack their new host. Rejection and attack. Both could kill her. The medical professionals were doing everything they could to ensure neither would happen. What if Maggie and I could help them? What if we left the clear sailing of the bone marrow transplant up to the doctors, and conducted a different kind of transplant? What if we met in the marrow of our souls and moved beyond our lifelong tendency to reject and attack each other?
    People have said I was brave to undergo the bone marrow extraction. But I don’t really think so—you’d have to be a miserable, crappy person to refuse the opportunity to save your sibling. But getting emotionally naked with my sister . . . this felt risky. To dig deep into never-expressed grievances, secret shame, behind-the-back stories, blame, and judgment wasn’t something we had done before. But my sister’s life hung in the balance. And so, over the course of a year, sometimes with the help of a guide but mostly on walks and over coffee, just the two of us, and sometimes with our other sisters, we opened our hearts, we left the past behind, and we walked together into a field of love.
    What I learned from both transplants—the bone marrow transplant and the soul marrow transplant—is that the marrow of thebones and the marrow of the self are quite similar. Deep in the center of the bones are stem cells that can keep another person alive, perhaps not forever, but for a time and, in the case of my sister, for what she called the best year of her life. Deep in the center of the self are the soul cells of who you really are. Dig for them, believe in them, and offer them to another person, and you can heal each other’s hearts and keep love alive forever.
    Here’s one more thing I learned. You don’t have to wait for a life-and-death situation to offer the marrow of yourself to another person. We can all do it, we can do it now, and there’s a chance that the life of our human family does indeed depend on it.
    And this is how I finally came to write a book about authenticity and love.

    Throughout the book you will find snippets from my sister’s journals—“field notes,” as she called them, from the varied layers of her life. Besides being a nurse, mother, farmer, baker, musician, and maple syrup producer, my Renaissance sister was also an artist and a writer. Her artwork evolved over the years into exceptional botanical pieces and prints that hang in