My older sister left this world in 1992.
She took her own life, yet for many years I refused to face this truth.
We were extraordinarily close.
She was ten years older than me, and from the moment I was born, she was the one who held me, fed me, walked with me, and played with me.
In many ways, she raised me.
I loved her deeply and depended on her completely.
After she left, I could not even bring myself to think about it.
In truth, I was running away.
Only years later, when I finally found the courage to look at this wound directly, the first thing that rose within me was anger.
A cry from the deepest part of my being:
“How could you leave me like this?
How could you abandon me and take away the love I relied on?”
This anger was not only mine.
It carried the echoes of my family’s ancestral energy—
the emotions passed down through generations.
As I continued to stay with this experience, the anger eventually softened, settling into a stillness. But even then, something felt incomplete.
So, I sat quietly with my feelings, allowing them to teach me in their own timing.
And then, in less than a minute, something extraordinary arose—
gratitude.
A pure, luminous gratitude rising directly from my soul.
I felt grateful for the love she had given me.
Grateful for how she had cared for me, protected me, and accompanied me through the beginning of my life. Grateful that my soul had once been met with such sincere devotion.
The moment this gratitude appeared, all the anger, all the pain of separation, all the sorrow of being abandoned dissolved instantly, falling away like a wall crumbling to dust.
Only then did I truly see:
the power of gratitude is immense.
I saw that she had, in truth, loved me deeply.
And when this understanding arose from my heart—not from thought, but from the living truth within me—every layer of suffering lost its strength.
All the grief, all the longing, all the heaviness simply disappeared.
What followed was a quiet, sacred feeling—
the knowing that she and I had never been separated.
It felt as though she lived in my soul,
in the innermost chamber of my heart.
She had never left.
There was no distance, no ending, no loss.
I was astonished:
“How can gratitude hold such miraculous power?”
But it does.
It transforms.
It heals.
It reconnects.
Over the years, I have come to understand that
a grateful heart naturally dissolves the barriers within our learning and growth.
Without gratitude, we remain entangled
in resentment, guilt, and pain—
circling endlessly without finding a way out.
Gratitude is a precious opportunity
to connect—with others, with the universe, with the Dao.
It is a sacred energy that rises sincerely from within,
lifting our consciousness and expanding our inner world.
It is not repayment.
It is not obligation.
Gratitude is a realm of our own being.
It belongs to us.
It is independent of anyone else.
By Suzhen Liu
