Kathy Doore: The Lady of Markawasi

Several years back, Rob’s co-author for The Fog,  invited us to lunch to meet Kathy Doore.  I can’t remember where this lunch took place, but I do remember Kathy’s passion for Markawasi, Peru.

This mysterious place has been on my bucket list since that first lunch, when she gave us her book about Markawasi. Bruce and his wife, Lynn, signed up for a tour with Kathy to Peru. Unfortunately, health issues prevented her from leading that trip and it was postponed to the following year.

Kathy and I got to be friends. We would meet for lunch periodically at the Macaroni Grill, and she would invariably have coupons that would entitle us to a three-course meal for ten bucks apiece. These lunches usually lasted a couple of hours and were never trivial or superficial. She wasn’t the sort of person who talked about her manicure or her love life or even much about her personal life. For her, it was always about ideas concerning consciousness, the nature of reality, synchronicity, UFOs, the paranormal in all of its strange and often bewildering manifestations.

For me, a Gemini writer, Kathy was a treasure trove of speculations. She was right up my alley, a woman with whom I could talk about the weird and the strange and who sat there nodding, understanding, Yes, yes, I get it.

During one of our lunches, she told me about her experience in a fog on Lake Michigan, in which she talked to her dead father and experienced a time displacement that paralleled Gernon’s in the Bermuda Triangle years before. I had my iPad with me at that lunch and did her astrological chart. The transits looked great, with Jupiter expanding her work opportunities and Saturn bring in solidity, a foundation.

But as I was telling Kathy about these aspects in her chart, I remembered what my mentor, Renie Wiley, had told me years before about Jupiter transits. Yeah, this planet is about luck and expansion and all the good stuff. But often when it forms a positive angle to a particular planet, it offers the soul a way out.

“Wow, Trish, I hope all this stuff unfolds,” she said. “Because I’ve been feeling that I may be passing over, that what I came here to accomplish is done.”

One evening, we had Kathy over for dinner and she sailed in with the makings of a killer salad and Rob made some delectable dish and we drank wine and coffee and talked for hours. The only reason she left was because she had an aging cat to tend to.

The last time we saw her, it was at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, where she, Bruce and Lyn, Rob and I went ghost hunting.

This morning, March 5, we heard from Bruce Gernon that Kathy, who’d had emergency intestinal surgery late last fall, was in hospice. Lynn, Bruce’s wife, called us this evening to tell us that Kathy had died. She was 61. She was estranged from her brother, had a couple of distant cousins, a few close friends. She died alone in hospice, died as she had lived, a mystery, a riddle, a private woman, an enigma.

Her legacy is that she brought the mystery of Markawasi into western consciousness. She was proof that each of us has something unique to contribute to the larger collective of humanity.

I won’t say RIP to you, Kathy. You were, after all, a Do-er, and that won’t change in the afterlife. You’ll be galvanizing souls on the other side and your passion will forever prevail!