A few years after my aunt’s death, I followed a visceral longing for our “home ground,” and began to spend more time in Louisiana. The acute grief I had lived in, and with, after her leaving, softened into a kind of sad-sweet “background” of my life. She had lived, had been a lively and spirited part of my own life, and now was gone. But in this “home place” where she and my father and their parents and grandparents and ancestors had played out their lives, the realities of past and present blurred. The past wasn’t something that had happened already; it was a living, thriving part of my everyday life.

The following is a little note from earlier this year…..

1/31/18 a.m.
Bodi and I take a good and long walk toward the river this morning. Sun melts up over the woods and shines on little ponds. The air is colder; and in the night, frost has settled on the grass. The ground is wet, but we walk on the batture anyway, to be closer to the woods. Bodi picks up a few burrs in his cottony paws. Red shouldered hawks sing from trees, and egrets hunt in puddles. At the beach, much driftwood has piled up, worn smooth by the pounding Mississippi. The usual mess of debris, swept up somewhere far away and deposited here, lies all around: battered hard hats, used water bottles, bits of rusted pipes, and other trash. Tracks of beaver and herons and ducks trail across the sand.

At the water’s edge, the steady, churning, relentless and busy river flows. I stand and take pictures of the contrasts – the river’s quiet force, the long sandy stretch of wet powdery soil, a fallen and current-beaten log, the distant industry of oil and chemical plants, the tug boats pushing barges upriver.

I want to sit on a log, and watch it all. I want to see with these aging eyes what you saw in your own life, in those quieter times – the little busyness of a ferry or two chugging across choppy water, and maybe a few carcasses swept up – a dead and bloated pig, an injured duck, a ravaged dog.

I have no idea what you saw then, but now, a new layer of this waterway and its life is settling over my skin, resting side by side with what my little girl eyes saw in small snatches and wondered about, and longed to know better.

If I had been a freer child, a more adventurous girl, I’d have slipped away from the clutch of homes, drawn by all the exciting tales about the river. I’d have sat on a sodden log, watched and waited, been swept up like all the driftwood bits, like one of the ducks or wild pigs, and made myself a nest. A little nest of happy watchfulness at the edge of this big stream.

But I didn’t.

Still, here I am all these years later, sinking into these layers of love, of a wild place, and of where you used to be, right here in front of me now.

Home.

Grief, it turned out, became a doorway into my past, my family’s past, and the place of my beginnings. In returning to Louisiana, I felt at home – my body knew where it belonged. I bought a tiny house, just a five-minute walk from where my father and my aunt had been born. I planted little trees, learned the names of wild plants I had passed by as a child, explored wild places, re-learned how to live on the wide, flat, soggy, irrepressible and throbbing-with-life land.

Some of my values were tested. I had preached for years against the use of toxins in gardening , but now weeds of every kind choked little flower beds, threatened to take over my newly planted fruit trees. I still don’t know what to do about that. And while I’ve never been a fearful person, am pretty comfortable with “adventuring” into wild areas, finding alligator tracks on my morning walk, or spotting a snake slithering away just inches from my feet made me understand that Louisiana is a different world. A luxurious, complicated, tangled and lively place. And a little bit scary. So while I fall in love with it more every day, that love is complicated too.

The weather is steamy, sometimes overwhelmingly lovely, sometimes pretty cantankerous. And recently, shifting. I’ve driven down to “the end of the land,” in Lower Montegut and Isle de Jean Charles, and seen land slipping away, water taking over what used to be tiny towns. Learned more about the challenges of salt water intrusion into bayou country, where whole areas of live oak trees stand, their thick trunks hidden now in brown water.

Even in my little Louisiana home, grief hunts me down, is never far away – has become a new facet of my life as a vulnerable creature in this glorious and fragile world.

The following is a little journal entry written in the midst of a ferocious Louisiana storm –

4/14/18

We are all waiting for the storm –

On this morning’s walk, many wild and flowering things spotted – egrets and ibis on the flooded batture pond – blackberries ripening – blue vervain blooming – some lyre leaf sage still in flower. Wild onions line the levee trail, the yellow dock has begun to seed, wild irises lean over the ditch. Many frogs sing in the dew-heavy grass.

And then the storm begins. Tornado warnings blare. I scurry around, move everything that could blow away back into the shed, or against the wall. The sky darkens, clouds suddenly move fast in the opposite direction as the wind begins to gust. A bit of lightning flashes. A few birds brave the feeder. Thunder rumbles from afar as all the color bleeds out of the day.

I hunker down and wait. And think about care and loss and how to weather it all. I’m not sure how much I can stand to love this place, and then watch it disappear – my whole life, lately, an exercise in watching love sink down. But my Louisiana cousins have done it – kept the faith – stayed true to their roots and the water-logged soil they’re planted in.

Maybe all we can ever do is be quietly, imperfectly felled by love. Maybe all I can do is to write out that love in little halting bits – a few battered flower petals spilled on the ground of an ordinary life. I don’t know if this will matter at all. But we can never cease to love, to let our hearts be given away, and sometimes torn to shreds. Maybe that care can help heal and nourish our struggling world, our home place, our fellow creatures in this lovely and changing place. This home.

“We belong to the long brave flowering of the world unfolding one battered, stupendous petal at a time.”

Grief is a ragged journey we’d so much prefer not to take. But we don’t really get to say “No.” And, time after time, we make it through. We learn how much we can do, and bear. How much we can handle, and still show up for a life. The “skin” of our awareness stretches to include the confounding, grizzly reality of loss. Grief grinds us into a powder that becomes mortar, binding us to this mysterious, confounding fact of being a time-limited creature in this marvelous, and temporary, world.

One of the difficult gifts of loss is resilience. Psychologist Arielle Schwartz describes what she calls “resilience psychology,” noting that it “allows you to adapt and even grow in response to loss and painful or traumatic life events. Research on resilience shows us the behaviors and beliefs that are associated with greatest adaptation and provide a road-map that guides and assists with the process.

Integration of resilience strategies allows you to:
Turn towards the supportive presence of a caring community
Listen to others who are grieving and benefit by learning how they are feeling and coping
Recognize that by pacing your process you are able to navigate through painful and overwhelming feelings
Find strength and courage once again
Stay open to life knowing that loss and painful events happen

When you are confronted with grief in your life, consider the following as stepping stones that you can take each day:
How can I connect with others in a meaningful way?
Can I express my grief by talking, writing, painting, or movement?
What are my dreams saying? What is my healing story?
What must I surrender to or let go of?
In what ways am I being called to be strong and courageous?
In what way do I need to ask for help?”

As we learn to live with loss, our shared stories become comfort and courage for others, and add to our resilience. We create a gentler, and more realistic, way of seeing life – not as just the fantasy world where everyone is young and we are always gloriously happy, but a real world where joy and struggle, loss and love live neck and neck.

The following is a little entry from Year 2 of the letters –

“There is no answer. Life is full of holes. Grief is real. It lives neck-and-neck with joy. The emptiness packed right in there with the brave, honeyed busyness of everyday life. There is no getting over it. I am living the awesome, awful truth of life and death, all woven together. Complicated, multi-layered, and not all of the layers are sweet.

If Nanette were cooking, she would say you have to pay attention, take your time; one layer, then the next. In the end, the flavors seep into each other, settle into something nourishing and rich, each effort different than the last.

Here, now, the sweetness runs through me. You are still with me in some way I don’t understand, but willingly drink up. Oh, the happy truth of it all.”

Grief is living with the fullness of what it means to exist. Grief is the truth: everything will be swept away. But grief is not the only truth, and in its darkness, the little lights of an everyday life begin to shine.

In recent years, increasing awareness of the struggles and graces of grief has revealed important options for healing. The support of community, the practice of writing, psychotherapy, bereavement groups, time spent alone, patience with ourselves, and sharing our experiences with others can all help to alleviate some of the weight of bearing loss.

Another important suggestion for coping with grief has been the practice of mindfulness. While the practice is ancient, and is often noted to have its roots in such Eastern spiritual traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism, many religious and spiritual traditions recommend methods of noticing, harnessing and deepening our attention.

Recent research notes that some benefits associated with the practice include better emotional coping strategies, better memory, better focus, a lessening of depression, and a stronger immune system.

But, as author Megan Devine notes, there are a number of misunderstandings about what mindfulness means. Often, the take-home message seems to be that if you would only breathe and relax, you would see that everything is perfect just as it is. But while Devine notes that “there are times — like in grief — when that message is un-useful at best and offensive at worst.” When facing loss, “that kind of talk is a smack in the face to someone in deep pain.”

A better understanding of mindfulness can help to clarify its usefulness in the journey of grief. Greater Good Magazine, published by the Berkeley center of the University of California, defines mindfulness as “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens.” It involves “acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a right or wrong way to think or feel in a given moment.” (https://www.greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/mindfulness))

According to Megan Devine, “Mindfulness is meant to help you acknowledge the truth of the moment you’re in, even, or especially, when that moment hurts…..Acknowledgment of the truth is a relief, and it heals.”

In spiritual wisdom traditions, mindfulness was originally meant to be a gateway into interior stillness and exterior non-reactivity. It was a movement toward depth, wherein we could meet the unnameable Mystery that underlies all of life, and enter into the joys and sorrows and meanings of love.

Theologian and author Beverly Lanzetta notes that “Mindfulness is, in the end, a high state of mystical awareness, a sensitive attunement to the gentle mercy and glorious gift of being. It is the inner discipline applied to daily life events, which moves the soul closer to the abundant, exuberant, silent, glorious freedom of being fully alive.” (beverlylanzetta.net)

In the wrenching and confusing journey of loss, we might not consider the pain of grief, or a heightened awareness of suffering, to be much of a gift. But I found that, as hard as the experience of grief was, it also led me to a place I might not have gone without its prompting.

There comes a point in the journey of loss where the raw and wrenching conjunction of grief and joy and remembering and breaking open become one holy “soup” – the messy mysterious soup of daily life.

We are drinking it up, with every breath.

“It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One thing I’ve learned about grief: that it grows the heart, sometimes wrenching it open, sometimes with the gentlest touch. I met a man yesterday who told me that his wife had died several years ago after struggling with breast cancer. Before she died, when she was still resilient and strong, she began to run. Every morning, 5 miles. He decided to run with her. It was a way they could celebrate life and strength and health, for a while. Now that she’s gone, he’s continued to run. And he’s begun to see the world in a different way. Each small thing is a gift. He fills pockets full of treats when he runs, and gives them to dogs he meets along his route. He’s the cookie man; all the dogs are so happy to see him. It’s a little thing, but it brings him joy. It brings them all joy – the dog owners, the pups, the man himself.

I’m in love with my mornings, too. Every day is filled with beauty and surprises. Ibis flickering up from the pond as Bodi and I pass by; the dewy violets, blooming so thick in the lawn; orange sun up through the batture woods; the river pushing at its banks; a red winged blackbird singing nearby.

There’s something about the deep wound of loss that pierces through the sameness of our everyday vision, and teaches us what’s real. We learn how love expands; how we are linked to every living thing; how our whole life encloses and holds dear the vulnerable, the lost, the delicate, the simplest things – a knot of family, a single tree, a wounded dog, a ragged and precious place. What else could we possibly be but little love rooms, wrapping our gauzy arms around the world?

I ran across this entry recently, and even though today is not Min’s leaving day anniversary, it reminded me of how much, and long, those tenderest feelings surface with just the slightest invitation – grief, and beauty, intertwined…..

9/4/a.m.
A short walk, but some good things spotted: a pileated woodpecker overhead, and a loon on its way to the lake. Gentle and warming air, crickets throbbing. The waters calm, a thin mist skating toward the sun. A found pear, dropped from a neighbor’s tree, only slightly bruised, and delicious.

At home, some sunflowers have been felled by squirrels who are after seed. The scented gladiolas are delicate; moon-colored petals shifting in a small breeze.

And….its your day again. Your leaving day. All I want to do is lie in the sunny window, listen to grasshoppers throb, watch the pale sky, and rest, and wait. For you. Or for whatever is left of you – the wispy breath of the mystery of your having been, and having gone.

I don’t know what I’d call this drift of feelings – sadness – or loneliness – or a delicate anger (if such a thing exists). But it feels quiet, and patient. Blessed, and mystified. A wordless emptiness: maybe the silence a bee must feel when the nectar has been sucked right out of the flower it’s working on, and the bee is full. It has to move on. But, Oh, for that instant it was fully alive, drinking the juice right up, and it was enough. It was so very, very good.

Maybe it’s surrender, that quiet emptiness – not like giving up, but giving in. Giving over. To a terrible truth and its beautiful grace.

Well….I’m going to do it, lie here in the sun, in the wild silence, and wait. And be. Now, Bodi sleeps downstairs. The house is quiet. Grasshoppers sing and scritch their end-of-summer song all around the house.

Grief has taught me so many things: how precious our close relationships are, even after they come apart. And how love is all that matters, really – we are all awash with love, alight with love, shaped and transformed by love. Taught, daily, by love. After all, who knows what will happen to the world? To anyone we know? To us? Maybe the best we can do is soften the rough edges of this motley, ragged and curious journey – with love.

It’s been over 7 years since my dear Aunt Min left this world. Hard to believe. Her death, and the continuing presence of our time together, and our little “love room,” still inform my life in many ways. I am here in Louisiana, for a while, because of her. I make my way forward with a kind of feisty humor, with her example. She was certainly not a saint, or at least not any more than the rest of us are everyday saints. But she was alive, curious, open-minded, and yet faithful to her beliefs and observations. She was spirited. She worked hard. She loved, and marveled at, life.

Jane Brody’s article on understanding grief in the Personal Health section of the New York Times (Jan. 15th, 2018) offers a new perspective on loss. As ragged and raw as it can be, Brody notes, “grief is not a problem to be solved or resolved. Rather, it’s a process to be tended and lived through in whatever form and however long it may take.”

Brody recommends two authors who write about grief and encourage us not to hurry, or try to “fix,” the problem. Megan Devine (“It’s OK that you’re not OK”) and Julia Samuel (“Grief Works: stories of life, death, and surviving”) offer perspectives that can shift our personal experiences and our cultural expectations of grief. Devine hopes that “if we can start to understand the true nature of grief, we can have a more helpful, loving, supportive culture.”

As Brody notes, relatively few of us know what to say or do that can be truly helpful to a relative, friend or acquaintance who is grieving. In fact, relatively few who have suffered a painful loss know how to be most helpful to themselves.

In my own journey, grief is not just a “wrong” or “problematic” thing, but a terrible grace that continues to shed a rarefied light on every step I take into the future. In the lingering love room, I continue to live – with loss, with sadness, with disbelief, with the presence of my beloved who is gone (but not quite totally). Perhaps, as a culture, we are shifting toward a gentler and more realistic take on this mysterious reality in which our “love rooms” soften our journeys forward, our beloveds shine their particular light upon us, and we are never really alone.

 
After three years, and several “phases” of lingering at the love room door with my aunt, I began to lean forward instead of backward. I still loved our time together, was still paying attention to, and grateful for, little whispers of her presence. And yet – I began to feel a need to lift up out of the fog of grief. I needed a life. I was, after all, still here. I spent time reading about what others had experienced of loss and holding on, and letting go. The following is a little letter written at the beginning of the fourth year without my aunt.

1/31/14
Lately I’m reading more memoirs of grief to see what people have said about this rarefied time when we (those of us left behind, and what’s left of our beloveds) still show up, somehow together, still hanging on.

There are some interesting observations: sleep changes (check); dry mouth (check); sinus issues (all those tears, waiting to be shed); and a “romance” with the lost one, so much brighter than the prickly, tedious chore of loving someone who’s alive. Well…I guess I have been doing that with you, with all these little notes left at the love-room door.

But what is real, anyway? Even the sharpest intellect, the bravest soul, might feel the presence of the beloved after they’re gone. Isn’t the web we make together real? Isn’t the rupture a loss? Wouldn’t part of us still be intertwined, and regret the tearing away?

Another note – that the more people who share the loss, the gentler it becomes. There are more folks to hold up the “presence,” and the absence, of the beloved. Could that be why this is so constant for me? I am carrying you, and your loss, mostly by myself. And could you be insistent on leaving a little footprint on a heart – specifically mine? Could you have worried you’d be forgotten?

One more important point – that the survivor, the traveler of that gray desert landscape, has to finally choose to live, to fling open a door, a heart, to what is still here. What courage that must take. But also common sense, for who could stand facing a whole life that was gray, drab, halfhearted?

Can I let the silky love-room walls flutter around my shoulders, catch my eye, and still walk toward what is mine alone?

I hope that your way forward, if such a thing exists, is gentle and kind. I hope you can settle into rest. I hope you are swimming in love – that gigantic, quivering sea that is so much more than we know. I hope you can see that I’m happy; that things are okay; that I still love the world, even though you’re not in it anymore; that my breath still sighs with love for you every once in a while.

But I am choosing to move ahead. I don’t think this will shut you out; but it could move me toward what we were always about – the deep and thriving resilience of following what’s real. I still want to live. I have lessons to learn, hands to hold, mornings to love. Skin and organs and thoughts. I am something you’re not anymore. Here.

This morning, Bodi and I walked out into yet another frigid day. It was minus 16 degrees. It took us a while to leave the house. I had to snuggle him awake. And set out his food. While he ate, I put on silk long-underwear, my fleece overalls, a fleece vest. Then the full-length down coat was buttoned all the way up; my fuzzy winter aviator hat, pulled on tight. The woolen scarf, wrapped tightly around my neck and lower face, came next. Then, the insulated winter boots, with the bright orange ice-grippers pulled over the bottoms. Then I put on Bodi’s warm winter doggie coat; and then his booties. He’s never so happy about this, but he submits anyway. Wearing them, he won’t have to stop every few steps and hold up a frozen paw, or try to chew ice balls from between his pads, or lick away the road salt that burns his skin. Once his booties were all velcrod on, I tucked his package of snacks in one of my pockets, his leash in the other, and pulled on my own down mittens. Then out we went, into the pink snow as first light colored up the sky. It was a lot of work just for a doggie walk. But this is what love does.

It struck me that even after a beloved dies, the work of love continues.

In scrolling through the Letters from the Love Room book, I spotted the word “work” mentioned 120 times. The work of love. The work of grief. The work of holding on, and of letting go. The work of going forward.

So many times, I wasn’t very good at the work of loving Aunt Min. I had a lot of hopes, some of them based on fact. I knew my aunt cared about me. I expected to be pretty good at loving her. I expected her to be pretty good at loving me. But it wasn’t always easy. I wish I could ask her now, across the fading love room threshold, how she thinks we did. I still have some regrets – I wish I’d trusted myself more, and maybe set some limits on how much I did. I wish I had been able to ask her how she felt about being so near her end-time. Knowing my aunt, I’m pretty sure she was working at love too. In the last year, there were ways she softened, gave up a bit of her fierce independence and let me make choices she might not have made on her own.

These tensions and struggles and accommodations were not the best parts of our love room together, but I think they were some of the most instructive, and strengthening. They were the ways I learned about what it takes to be human, to be open and vulnerable, to do the work of real relationship.

In his conversation with On Being radio host Krista Tippett, writer Alain du Botton described this work: “Love is a painful, poignant, touching attempt by two flawed individuals to try and meet each others’ needs in situations of gross uncertainty and ignorance about who they are and who the other person is.” And, he says, “we’re going to do out best.” This “acceptance of ourselves as flawed creatures,” is what love really is.

Psychologist Therese Rando talks about work, too, as a primary challenge of dealing with loss: “Grief is work. It requires the expenditure of both physical and emotional energy. It is no less strenuous a task than digging a ditch or any other physical labor…..Grief can deplete you to such an extent that the slightest tasks become monumental, and what previously was easily achievable now may seem insurmountable.”

In these years after Min’s death, the work of love has become intertwined with the work of grief. The work of relationship continues on. But it’s a luminous and rarefied work these days, not taking as much effort, tinged with the sweetness of memories that are constantly teaching me what love is, and preparing me for the work of continuing  to love the world.

Back at home now after our walk, I sip tea and make some notes. Bodi has licked ice balls from his fuzzy legs and is sighing into sleep next to me. The sun has slipped through trees and is lighting up the walls; the sky is blue, the air a bit warmer – up to 3 degrees! Oh, there is so much to love.

I am constantly being taught, refined, ground down, transmuted into a version of myself that can bear, and share, more love. For this, I am ever grateful.