Wailing Wall: Alice Walker's Sister Dies...While Other Sisters Die In Israel

Alice Walker's newest article entitled "Sister Loss" is a testament to the power of blood. She gives insight to feelings which arose from the ashes of her sister's cremated body. Her grief is paralleled with the atrocities happening overseas in Israel. We quickly begin to make the connection that sisters can be much thicker than blood.

Here is a snippet of Alice Walker's "Sister Loss" on the Root:

My sister Annie Ruth Walker Hood died the morning of Dec. 27, 2008: Throughout the four days leading up to her death in Hospice, friends and I sat in ceremony, thousands of miles away, chanting, praying, meditating and speaking at times to her spirit and soul. It was a difficult transition for her; at the end, for us at least, there was a palpable feeling of release, of peace. We were close as children, but grew apart as the years turned into decades since we lived near each other, and our ways in the world proved very different. She didn’t believe in voting, for instance, which I found an affront to those who, voting even when their lives were endangered, made attempts year after year to change a system that kept her and others like her relatively poor, without health care, undereducated and largely ignorant of anything not seen in a flash on television.

Just last year she discovered, and believed, the earth was in trouble, running out of resources, and immediately decided to recycle her paper napkins and garbage bags. But voting, no. Seeing Earth as divine, rather than a fundamentalist religion that encourages passivity and “heaven” for a few thousand souls, no. So we disagreed.

The morning of her death my friends and I moved our circle from outside the house to the dining-room table. Holding hands we urged her to let go. I had written a poem for her, and letting go was its theme. During her cremation, we again sat in circle, just my partner and I this time, a two-person circle, and waited until my niece called from Atlanta, to tell us the machine had stopped and the cremation was done. No pun intended. But my sister would have enjoyed this, even if one were intended. Anything to do with cooking, eating, ovens and refrigerators aroused her interest; she loved to eat. This had, unfortunately, contributed to her ill health.