Sometimes it's time to say good bye

it's harder when you see it coming.

If you read my November 19th post about how I started doing annual world predictions, you got the chance to hear a little bit about how I met my friend Karin Bellantoni.

Karin always wanted me to write about my experience with her and how our dynamics were around my work as a medical intuitive. The medical intuitive work is different than psychic work. Sometimes it’s not that easy to understand or explain. It comes from some place I can’t describe the way I can the other work that I use.

Karin trusted me and my abilities maybe more than I did. At some point in our friendship it occurred to me that she came to be before her doctors. I can’t say I was comfortable with this but I think it helped her trust doctors when she had to.

During lockdown Karin started experiencing major lung issues. Hard to breath. I begged her to move. At the time she was living right next to ground zero in lower Manhattan. She had been there since before 9/11. Every time I read for her to alleviate concerns about these symptoms I would say “Please move. Please do what you can to get out of there.” Karin would say something to the effect that her lease was up in six months or a year or whatever it was at the time and then she would move. I would come back with a “Just do it now”.

I’m not a “fire and brimstone” type reader. I don’t tend to lean into hysteria. Sometimes though there are messages that come through that cause me to make very intense statements. And sometimes it’s really hard not to feel the emotional tie you have to who you are reading for. I didn’t read for friends and relatives for quite some time until I knew I had it in me to lovingly detach from who was sitting in front of me.

But I knew this was big and I knew it would be hard to get Karin to doctors, to a hospital. “I’ll go see my reiki person” got on my nerves to no end. It was hard for her to listen. It always took a “GO NOW”.

As Karin’s faith in me was always bigger than my own, her faith in faith was and will probably always bigger than mine.

Karin’s sister was 22 when she died in a car accident. Her mother wasn’t sixty when she passed. I think her fight to stay here on her terms was beyond big. I’m not sure I could ever grasp how she felt about her own mortality. We spoke very often about her fear of dying alone. We would have these conversations when the world was open and free and before the year 2020 felt like it would loom.

And then lockdown. Karin was in her apartment on the West Side Drive in Manhattan overlooking the 9/11 memorial. We would talk daily as I was with my daughter in the Catskills. We FaceTimed as Karin refused to do much else. Our usual conversations of business and creating things were now full of fear and her inability to breath correctly.

“Please please please find a way to get yourself to a hospital” I kept pleading. I had no way to know this would happen as they were making the Jacob Javitz Convention Center a make-shift hospital and there were morgue trucks on every block. All I knew is that there were major “welts” on her lungs and she needed to be cared for physically and spiritually in only the way a physician could.

A friend of Karin’s who was a nurse drove down from Connecticut when there wasn’t a vehicle on the street for state after state and took her to the hospital. She was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. This is a blanket statement as the details were varied and very specific. It was rare. It was enormous.

And once she started all care she could get, she somehow had the strength to move her entire life to Laguna Beach, California.

“I have people there. I need to see something beautiful. I need freedom. I cannot heal here.” Off she went with her beloved cat, Oliver, all of her belongings and most likely more control of her destiny than she had in a very long time.

Karin somehow……well, I wouldn’t say ‘overcame’ the lung cancer but it did hit some sort of remission. She had other ailments come and go. She dug into her work as a business mentor to major corporations. She supported and pushed executives to see through their blocks.

In this time she also became my student. She dove into her already strong intuition and brought what I taught her into business. We were on the phone and emailing constantly. I still had to let her know if this doctor was right or that body worker was wrong and she was still the best business consultant I’d ever worked with.

About two months ago I got a text from Karin.

“I need to know if I should go to the ER”

I read her for a moment and texted back “Go now”

She responded with “OMG”. As she told me the story later, she was driving in a car with a friend. Karin told her to turn around immediately and go right to the ER. The friend responded with “Heather tells you to go and you go?” Karin said “You don’t know the relationship between me and Heather.”

The diagnosis with in a couple of hours was five lesions on the brain.

Karin passed on December 25th, 2023. I loved that. Karin loved Christmas. She loved all things that were meaningful to our shared Italian heritage. She gave every new pet of a friend an Italian middle name.

She was never alone. Friends came together to create a system of care and comfort for her. As it was relayed, she passed easily after having “bacon right off the griddle” in her Pink Floyd t-shirt relaxing near the beach.

The experience of reading all these events in her readings, many of which I haven’t included, keeps me in an emotional space I don’t have words for. Yes, it includes grief and powerlessness but it also includes a terrible sadness. It comes from a corner of my body I’m not sure was aware of. I’ve lost many people but I have never been so a part of what Karin calls “the diagnosis process from soup to nuts”.

Please have a moment and say hello to Karin, to yourself or out loud. You may not believe in all this but she does.