I lost my little sister, Dori, today. The love of her life, George, was with her when she left. She had been in the hospital for about a week. She’d had a hard time for the past month or two.

Dori had a remarkable life. I know everyone says that, but she really did. Her life was hard because of her struggle with type 1 childhood diabetes from the age of sixteen. As she grew from teenager to adulthood, the diabetes took pieces of her. It took her corneas. It took her bones with osteoporosis and left her with metal in her legs. It took her freedom to do things. It took everything it could, but it never took her spirit. She was unflappable, unsinkable, inspirational. As I understand it, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. So her own body’s defenses had been trying to kill her since she was a teenager, but she never said poor me. She said what can I do to make this world a better place.

When she was an adult in 1994-95, the diabetes had been ravaging her body relentlessly for twenty years. When things looked darkest, except to Dori, she was fortunate to receive an experimental multiple organ transplant of kidney and pancreas at UCLA Medical in Los Angeles. This operation gave her back a largely normal life without diabetes until twenty years later, in 2015-16, when her transplanted kidney started to fail. She eventually got a new kidney a year ago and seemed to be on a remarkable path to recovery once more. Though it was a little hard to tell with Dori. In her entire life, she never complained, at least, never to me.

Dori was far more than a person with an illness. She was determined not to be defined by her illness. She was a warrior in every sense of that word and more. She had so many hardships with her health and never complained. Instead, she did things to give back to the world, not take. In addition to her full-time job, she started a charity to help abandoned dogs. She took care of every stray cat on the block. She endlessly tirelessly worked to find homes for every lost pet and make it illegal for shelters to kill dogs and cats. It was what she could do to give back. Maybe at some point in her life, she felt lost and then was found, and wanted to give that gift of being found to other souls?

I’ve lost many people in my life, my father, my mother, my first wife, and now my only sister. I have grown to believe that when we leave this world, we recede from the physical into a nonphysical life lived in lucid dreams. This is an ancient belief that stretches back through all written history and farther, to the ages when we left stories behind on walls in caves. I write about these experiences and beliefs in my novels.

After I lost my first wife, Mazelle, months later, I reunited with her in dreams which eventually became powerful spiritual lucid dreams. Those nighttime experiences were so realistic that they were indistinguishable from daytime reality in their tactile solidity, except they were limitless. In them, I could fly, move things with my mind, hug a loved one and really feel it, and far more. They were like dreams come true. 

I believe Dori is now living in the limitless worlds of real lucid dreams. I believe she is soaring around in the clouds with a smile on her face that lights up the world. I believe she is happy again unbridled from the creaks and rattles of a frail human body that tried to hold her back and failed. I love you, little sister. I will miss you every day of my life. Please, visit me in dreams. Be happy. Be free. You did so much good in this world.