“ See the love we borrow?”

When my twin sister Roslyn died  at age of 32, I remarked how the world lost a courageous disabled voice of love and  truth. I lost a sister, a friend whom I knew largely through her stories and compassionate love to others. I was privileged to spend a bit of private and public time with her since I was a year old. I am Amanda’s imperfect student, but her life helped orient me to mine…

As a brother, I want to say that being open to her—allowing her life to interrogate my world—is one of the most life-giving things a sister can do to a brother.

When you show up in the world the way Rosyln did, you draw hope. Turns out that “love and truth” are unpopular topics in some quarters, maybe because they shine a light on things some want to keep shrouded in darkness?

She was fierce and gentle. I’ve never known anyone who held that paradox together better than she did. But for all of her ferocity, she always resolved everything in the alchemy of love.

With a deep bow of gratitude for her spirit, let her own words serve as her epitaph here: “I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love, and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.” Amen.

Her death made me question the Perception of Time, Seconds, Minutes, Hours, days, weeks, months. Years…decades…centuries. The rotation of our home planet around the light of the sun has become a sacrosanct understanding of time amongst most of us. 

However, if we were residents of a different planet, say Mars, a year would have been 687 days, and a day 24 hours and 37 minutes. Yet if we had begun measuring from the aforementioned Red Planet, a second would be shorter than it is on Earth.

The evolution of mankind’s thinking has seldom been without hints of fallibility. Time as we know it is an illusion. So let’s leave distortions in the continuum, gravity and general relativity aside temporarily. 

Curiosity has always led me to search for the answer on how time, in its absolute sense, is measurable. Life is a collection of moments. We exist for a certain period, with not the same set of circumstances individually, yet we act, we develop, there are learnings which are preserved as we persevere, and in the process there is undeniable growth and maturation.

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.” Leo Tolstoy, as I reflect on the life of Roselyn, whom we lost recently, on the day Earth made its full revolution around the light of the Sun, I realised how she lived it in her transient 30 years with such grace and love.

When she transitioned, I am told that the glow on her face was one of tranquil radiance, a soul ascending to the light with a reward for a life well-lived despite its hardships and adversities, to a realm where time itself ceases to exist. Where neither a fractional millisecond, nor endless millennia are measured. Where there is no loss or gain, no hate and no pain, only absolute existence. Where the soul can just simply be after a journey long travelled. A place where there is blissful peace, a realm called eternity, where her soul may rest, for all time to come.

Amanda, as we called her,  was a happy soul who enjoyed adventures and humour, while maintaining balanced responsibility to his health, as a loving soul with impeccable discipline.

He lived a life full and fruitful till the time came for her to peacefully exhale his final breath at the age of 31.

Death came as a blessing for her. But a loss for us, the ones left behind. Time inevitably heals our wounds, peacefully.

Because what we seek, quite often seeks us as well.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Hope to see you gain.

From a loving brother

Rest Well Love

Omondi Orony