We all have lost or will lose friends, parents, cousins, neighbors, life and death are two sides of the same coin, but I feel the loss of a healer differently, it is a very personal and intense relationship – between the healer and the suffering. Dr. Carol Tunney died on Friday, she was a former OBGYN with a strong commitment to women’s health and she left the medical profession over her great frustration at modern medicine and an often uncaring health care system. She became a shamonic healer, a soul retriever. I had heard of hear but not met her until last year when a friend recommended that I see her to help me with the panic and anxiety that has plagued me for most of my life.

I was reluctant to go and see a shaman, but Maria, who had gone to see Carol first to deal with issues in her own life,  told me how powerful and healing the experience of soul retrieval had been for her, and she urged me to go. I trusted Maria, and so I went.

I had experienced many years of healing – analysts, therapists, MD’s, naturopaths, hypnotists, spiritual counselors and a psychic or two. Carol was different. She talked to me for hours – she seemed to see right into my soul – and had me lay down in her healing room surrounded by drums, rattles and crystals. She took me back into my childhood and uncovered a long buried and consciously forgotten trauma in a hospital recovery room that opened my eyes to the night terrors I have experienced as long as I can remember. None of my previous healers had sensed or recovered that experience, Carol brought me right back into that room, right through a wall of my denials.

After our soul retrieval – she journeyed with me to replace the broken parts of my psyche – my panic lessened considerably and so did my night fears. Carol and I became friends and shortly after that, Maria too  – Carol changed both of our lives in positive ways.

We invited Carol to the farm and she came several times. I went to her home in Vermont to photograph her two beloved dogs, Jill and Jack, both close to death.  She asked me for help in starting a blog, and in writing it, and in deciding how to choose a dog to replace Jack and Jill. We regularly met her for Thai or Vietnamese food in Williamstown, Mass. We both felt quite close to her.  I have to be honest, Carol began to trouble me  as I got to know her, she was a joyous and passionately committed healer, but she struggled profoundly to organize her own life. Her home had been destroyed when a drunk driver drove a truck into her living room, setting a fire that destroyed nearly all of her belongings and wiped out her finances. She did not have a permanent home after that.

Carol traveled the country and spoke frequently about shamonic healing, she was an articulate advocate for alternative medicine. Privately, she spoke of intense authority problems – she seemed to reject authority of all kinds, from the IRS to her accountants to academic administrators to almost anyone running conventional health care systems. She hoped to find someone with whom to share her life. She struggled with weight problems and I struggled to understand her unwillingness to make any decisions regarding her life without turning to spirit and animal guides (or a pendulum) for direction. As much as her healing helped me, I was uncomfortable with the notion that all of our decisions ought to be made outside of ourselves, by guides and spirits and animal helpers.

We talked openly about our lives – we had undergone the most intimate experiences together – but she would get angry and defensive if any of her decisions were questioned and the number of things we could not talk about seemed to grow – the opposite path of true friendships, I think.

Carol intensely emotionalized and anthropomorphisized her animals, giving them enormous spiritual and psychic powers in her life. We both avoided animal discussions – she hoped to get a wolf, if possible – as my notions of acquiring animals were so different than hers. I do not believe in arguing my beliefs or pushing them onto other people, we all have to find our own way, but this was another important subject we really couldn’t talk about after awhile, her ideas about getting animals were upsetting to me. Without a doubt, we had a soul connection, but it was strained by the realities of her life and mine.

I was struck always by Carol’s great passion for healing and her commitment to it. But I couldn’t help but worry about her health and her ability or willingness to manage her life or her finances, and it seemed that pile after pile or problems were adding up. She seemed to live almost entirely in the spirit world inside of her head. I knew she did not want help from me, nor did she want to discuss these issues and so we did not see much of one another in the final weeks of her life – we often texted or e-mailed one another but had begun to lose touch. I knew Carol was undergoing some health problems but did not know that she had been stricken with a lethal and fast-moving form of cancer, those details are not for me to talk about. In end, I could not find a way to be her friend, she existed beyond my reach or experience, and she had a powerful community of friends with whom she closely connected and who helped her through her final days.

I suspect Carol can well navigate between our world and the spirit world where I am sure she is gone, carried through her final moments by chants, rattles and drums. It is a great shame that modern medicine could not accommodate so intelligent and giving a physician and healer. She devoted her life, and perhaps even gave it , to putting the pieces of broken people back together.

Since she helped Maria and I so richly, I feel her loss in a particular way. I owe my life to healers who cared enough about me to penetrate my many broken walls, defenses and denials and helped me to understand the truth about myself. As a result, I live in panic and terror no more. The death of one of those people is a powerful experience for me, and I am struggling to make sense of it.

In our last conversation, Carol told me she was not afraid of death, only of suffering at the end of her life, and I am told she did not suffer in the loving hands of hospice workers and her family. I am grateful for that. If anyone in my life has ascended to a spirit dimension, and is living another life, I suspect it would be Carol, I think she never quite figured out how to live in this world, and I hope and pray she has found a better one. She deserves it.  I have found the best healers are often those that have suffered the most, they never forgot the others. For all of her problems, her healing spirit was the one that marked her life and defined it, the one that will forever be a part of me an of Maria.

Godspeed, Carol, I imagine you with Jack and Jill curled up with you on your new sofa, just as you hoped. I expect to hear from you any day.