“I find these days that all I want for Rayya anymore—if you can be said to want anything for somebody who has been dead for more than six years—is that she be free. Utterly and totally free.

“True love always liberates the beloved,” says my friend Martha Beck, and only now do I feel that I understand the generous, unfettered spirit behind these words.

I want Rayya to be free from the need to take care of me or anybody else—even from beyond the grave. I want her to be free to vanish into the eternal mystery with all her ancestors, and to become music—because that is what she always wanted to be.

And I can feel that Rayya wants me to be free, too. She wants me to live autonomously and happily and peacefully on this side of the divide— in a world that I have finally come to accept as my own, and from which I am no longer trying to escape. (It’s not such a bad world, actually, once you surrender to reality, and once you finally start showing up for your own care.)”