Last week I went to see Julie, who is a Reiki practitioner and I asked her about my sister, Diana. “Where is she?” I asked.

Julie took out her metal prongs and it wasn’t long after she had begun her ritual that the prongs sprung wide open. “She’s on the other side,” Julie said. “You’ll be able to feel her presence at the commemorative lunch.” Julie rubbed her arm. “I can feel the energy so strongly.”

I’m having my family over this Saturday to mark the one year anniversary of my sister’s death. These essays on grief are a tribute to her. A year of mourning.

“Ask your sister to give you a sign. Not just an ordinary sign but one that will make you know.”

Electrical impulses. I remember after her death, we all sat in the hallway waiting for the nurse to prepare her for the last visiting. None of us knew what to say. Then, suddenly, the fluorescent lights above us went out. The only ones among rows and rows of other lighting the hallway.

“I remember once reading that the dead communicate through electricity. I don’t know if others felt it but I felt my sister’s essence flash above us. She had left her body but there was something else.

Yesterday, as I was working with my new lap-top getting used to Windows 7 and the speed of my internal mouse, intending to open the file containing the novel I’ve been working on for the last few years my mouse went haywire and suddenly the file was deleted. That was tragic enough but even more questionable was that the file on my essays on mourning got deleted. How could that happen? I wasn’t even close to that file.

Electricity. The technician who sold me my laptop was able to recuperate the files but when I got home I couldn’t open them. I called my brother, a software troubleshooter for an aerodynamics company. “Bad news,” my brother told me.

I still have not lost hope but it is dwindling much like the hope I had a year ago when my sister was in ICU with life support attached to her body. I don’t know what all this means but I feel that I have been writing for all these months and years to arrive at a dead-end.

In preparation for my sister’s commemorative I have placed her photo on my mantle – a photo which I had taken a year or so before she died. Diana hated having her photo taken and was never satisfied with the results. This time though when I showed her the picture she said, “I like it.” By then she had already gone through several phases of chemo and radiation therapy, had lost her hair and now it had grown back. She was happy and hopeful and in that flash of the moment when she told me she liked the photo I knew that we were both thinking of her death.

I look at her photo on my mantle. I can’t help but think that perhaps she has something to do with all of this.  Is she telling me that my mourning is over?