Sometimes, we need shelter from the storm. The winds of loss buffet us, leave us weak and tattered. Our emotions after loss become a storm we can barely withstand.

After my aunt died, I took shelter in Nature, and in writing. I took shelter with my dog. Or with close friends who knew I was fragile. I saw mindless movies. Read endless crime mysteries that I instantly forgot. I took shelter in sun and warmth; in solitude, and in time with my grandson. I sought shelter in counseling with a practitioner who had known the “before” me, and the “after” me, and walked with me through the journey of transition. I sought out shelter in some “soft-core” addictions – to sugar, to tv, to gardening. I sought shelter in prayers, and in silence, and in staring into space. Nothing felt better than sitting alone and watching dust motes drift in the air. I could make it through my days if I took time out to just “be.”

I think that this was an important part of making it through loss. What I had depended upon, what I had known as reality, was being deconstructed, and my body and mind needed time to catch up. I needed to come apart. I needed time to grow a new capacity to withstand the reality of grief.

The following are a couple of letters on the graces shelter brought to my life after my aunt’s death –

1/1/12
On this quiet New Year’s Day, I sit at the cold pond, gaze at the snow, the sky, all the sparkles of hidden frost shining in the new sun.

And think about you. No matter what else I am doing, I am missing you, holding onto you, standing at the door of the love room, waiting for you. Maybe this is just how grieving is. Maybe all of us left behind—out of habit and confusion and not knowing what else to do—keep moving forward as if something else mattered, as if everything else were real. Which, of course, is true. But the still very palpable nearness of you, and the sweet, small enclosure of the love room we share, and the impossible wrenching away of what was so bright and real, still throb at the bottom of my heart.

I am wondering why.

Perhaps I have stumbled upon some shy but piercing truth about death and life: the heart is never done. What we think is real—this journey with its beginnings and endings, its sharp turns and boundaries and walls—is just another breathing in and breathing out, not so far away from that place where you are now. Not so far away from me.

4/10/12
I don’t know why it is taking me so long to believe this fact, to live with the emptiness you’ve left. Maybe death, the final loss, is just so wrenchingly, terribly impossible, it takes a while to settle in, to seep down through the layers of everydayness, of all the ways we cope and move on, to finally rest on the bottom—oh, if there is a bottom!—of the truth.

You must be moving on. I might be, too. Today I felt a little thrill of edging toward relief. The coming of the first summer in almost a decade without too much to do; without taking care of you, or something of yours.

I can feel it coming. I can’t wait.

Will that offset the hole you left behind? Probably not. But I might have time, and space, to recover. To rest. To sit with the love room and see what’s left of us. To swim for a while in the so many ways I love this life even though you’re not in it anymore.

You know how you love some people so much that they’re like part of you? Like part of your skin or bones? How sometimes you feel almost stricken with love, overwhelmed and overcome for a moment?

It struck me one day that, if we let in all the love we feel to its greatest depth, we’d probably just explode, melt, die. Our hearts would just sizzle and burn with the heat of so much care. I thought that maybe this is what Divine love feels like – wonderful, but we can only take it up in tiny sips.

We learn very early that some feelings are too much, too intense. We grow cautious, careful; we learn to keep quiet, to disguise or measure out our love. We get hurt. We don’t want to be too vulnerable. We grow afraid of what it would mean, to really give ourselves completely over to love. For better and for worse, that’s a normal part of growing up, of being human. We are always trying to find the awkward balance between caring intensely and guarding our own hearts.

It occurred to me that maybe this is part of what the love room is about….we feel so MUCH love for someone we can never adequately express. But all that love gets filtered through the busyness of everyday life, old hurts and fears, or just differences in styles of expression. Then, after someone is gone, the love room becomes the place, and the time, where that immense, intense love can safely spill out. All that we were unable to share with someone when they were alive floods through us. Maybe that’s why the love room, after someone is gone, feels so rarefied and precious. It’s the tenderest love we felt all along, but could only squeeze out in measured, imperfect drops.

Since my aunt died, and with my own aging, I’ve begun to realize that love matters more than anything else. I want the rest of my life to be about love. I want my heart to be less brittle and guarded; to be strengthened and softened and opened and healed. I pray for that everyday. What else, after all, can we really do in and for this world?

Grief and aging both made me more aware of all the things we eventually give up in a life. But while I found this wrenchingly difficult, it was also transformative. For after all, what do we really “own?” All of life is a gift – every moment, every relationship, the food we put in our mouths, the small joys of a garden in bloom or a silent snowfall, snuggles with a grandchild or a best friend. But how often we forget that we are blessed.

The following is a journal entry made one morning as a dear friend lay dying.

6/13
At the lake, the air is cool, just 50 degrees. Wind busies the water under a gray sky. A goose family with 3 chicks bustles through small waves. I sit on the rocky ledge and watch them, thinking about endings, and leaving, and my dying friend Janna. She is in her last hours, trying to tear away, but also reluctant to let go.

The dog follows a scent trail; sniffs out something interesting that turns out to be a pile of goose feathers, a dismembered leg with a rubbery yellow foot.

So many goodbyes. How does anyone – any person, or even any goose – ever manage this impossible thing – the Great and Final Tearing Away?

How do we let ourselves be torn open, dizzily love the so-many small things of a life, and face full-forward into that final dark blink? How do we stand solid in the middle, not certain which one is closer – another everyday, or the End?

“I see now with different eyes. The eyes of age, the eyes of context, the eyes of seasoned love. The eyes of forgiveness; the eyes of getting on with a life.”

There were times when Aunt Min and I struggled. We were each going our own way; each of us had to make it through challenges that shifted and forged how we were with ourselves, in the world, and with each other. We were both strong-willed women, and our relationship was not without conflict. In my younger adult years, when I was trying to recover from some challenging experiences, I often heard her suggestions as criticism. Sometimes, neither of us was exactly easy!

We learned that there were certain places we couldn’t go, and we made it through, with love and respect and a basic faith in each other. I learned about forgiveness. I learned that sometimes, everything doesn’t have to be said, or defended, and I can just let go.

For most of my adult life, I had believed that forgiveness a) came because the person who had hurt you acknowledged the slight, and offered a meaningful apology, and, b) that you felt you could heal from the slight, and be okay. After a while, forgiveness began to mean something different for me – it meant joy and love and pain and hurt and anger and all the misunderstandings, tangled together – standing in the same place. Right inside of me.

I learned that no one is perfect; no relationship, no matter how rich or committed, is without trials. People are quirky beings! But wrestling with vulnerabilities and strengths and personal histories created a surprising gift we’d otherwise not have known. The love room became the place where, not only could I tolerate the differences, but began to appreciate them for the rough graces they sometimes were. Those differences challenged, and changed, who we were. The following is a little note from Year 2 of the Love Room Letters.

“In the love room, like grains of sand pressing against each other, we are both shaping and being shaped.”

Nothing pushes us more relentlessly toward Mystery than the death of someone we love. In the face of great loss, our familiar, forward-leaning realities are uprooted and at risk. Nothing makes sense. We can’t fix the problem, and we can’t make it go away. We search for answers. We seek out some kind of comfort, or explanation, or meaning. We search for the God we know, or hope, exists. We remember the platitudes – Surely, “God has a plan.” Or, “God needed the person we’ve lost, and heaven is now a richer place with their presence.” Surely, “There’s a deeper purpose that we can’t understand.”

Sometimes, the wrenching experience of grief can challenge or change our perceptions of the Divine Mystery, no matter what form that has taken in our lives.

In letters from “A Grief Observed,” lay theologian and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis remarked: “Not that I am…. in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’ ”

Instead of being a “failure” of faith, though, the dark tunnel of loss can lead to deeper and illuminating experiences of the Divine. We might find, in the crucible of pain, that the God of our childhood needs to expand. We may want a new lens through which to see (and seek) Spirit. The “God of our Fathers” may shift to make way for a gentler or more feminine aspect of Divine Mystery – tenderness, instead of might; vulnerability, instead of strength; understanding, instead of judgment; ambiguity along with certainty.

One of the important theological concepts that emerged out of the horrendous anguish of the Holocaust was an expanded understanding of a God who not only does not abandon us, but suffers with us as well. A “Suffering God” co-participates in our sorrow; knows darkness and desolation, and stands in the shadows with us.

Walking through loss can take us deeper into Mystery than we had planned on going. But there are tiny enlightenments along the way. On her website, Theologian Dr. Beverly Lanzetta, notes, “…..Even our most personal, wrenching moments are imbedded in and bound by the eternal, the transcendent. This gives us hope that there is something greater and beyond the present…. Only by risking our hearts to emptiness—to the despair that there may be no path and no road—do we find what is immeasurable. We share then in the communion of all the saints who walk the earth—the communion of direct experience.”

In the scary fire of loss, we may touch upon, and enter, the dark and groaning territory of not knowing how things add up. We, too, may co-participate in the mysterious suffering and illumination of the world.

The following are brief letters from the love room where I wrestled with the Mystery of loss:

9/3/12
Yes, you’re gone. Yes, it is impossibly hard. Yes, there is still, for me, an emptiness. My eyes want to shed tears. But the nectar of your having-been is such nourishment that I am able to bear the Mystery turning itself inside out and taking you back.

12/1/12
Is life just a downward spiral of loss, a long journey of giving things up? Were you the shifted boulder that loosened the tumbling flood of so many other things being washed away? What can I count on, if everything can be gone? What am I, if not planted in a context of connections?

Could all these losses be meant to drive us inward, to whatever lasts—into Mystery, the ineffable sweetness of being? For that’s where I am now; lying stunned and awed on the floor of the love room, without you.

Loss, and grief, and the after-time with my aunt, brought hard but healing graces. In their light, I learned to see the world, and myself, and this awkward, luminous trek of life, through a softened and gentler lens.

I learned that love is an ongoing conversation. In making a deep commitment, I co-participate in the ongoing conversation of life. I begin to understand that we are all traveling a multi-faceted journey….interwoven with the multifaceted journey of our country, our culture, the world, our splendorous and struggling planet.

Any love room we make with another person is a site of that co-participation. Sometimes all we can do is show up. We can continue our own tiny part of the ongoing conversation of love, with patience and gratitude, and a visceral faith in our being-here-ness.

In my love room with life, I am constantly taught – about the multiplicity of ways to travel through this life, and about trusting that even the impossibly hard and confusing things are somehow part of the stunning and mysterious unfolding of the world.

The following is a little note, from Year 2, on the ongoing conversations of love with my aunt

3/9/12

I am beginning to think that anything real is complicated. Even the love room isn’t so easy sometimes — the lush loveliness of care, all the differences and edges, what it takes to keep showing up, even when things are hard. Complicated, and humbling—and still worth it.

We were complicated, too, you and me: never exactly matching up, but leaning toward each other with the best of intentions. Even now, we still show up.

12/24/12
 

Yesterday, in the midst of Christmas busyness and finishing up school work, I volunteered to help Lara move: meet her at her old apartment, load up our cars, schlep stuff over to the new place. But she was late, and there were a few “found” moments to just sit still, so I did. Sat there in my car on that cold city street, watching.

 
Nearby, two women got out of a car, walked toward the building. The wind buffeted their coats. They were well-dressed, talking, smiling. Both had white hair. The taller woman leaned forward, held her companion’s arm, wrapped herself around the shorter, older woman to shield her from the gusts. Her hair was cut in a stylish bob that flipped into her face, but I could see her smile, their smiles. Feel the love between them. They were so happy to be with each other. They were beautiful. I almost pulled out my camera to take a picture of them, but they slipped inside the building and were gone.

 
They reminded me of you, of us, of how sweet and good it felt, all those years, to wrap myself around you, to hold on so you wouldn’t slip — oh, that happy privilege.

 
The women came out again, moved toward their car. The taller woman glanced up at me. Amazing how much she looked like you — her narrow nose, the sparkle in her smile. Our eyes met. We both knew, in that flash of a glance, how lucky they were, to have and enjoy each other. Like we were lucky, too.

 
Love is contagious, and enough. These strangers, hanging onto one another, remind me.

A little letter to my aunt, from the love room, four years ago –

12/10/12

Cold today, at sixteen degrees and windy. Overhead, a few brown leaves tick against each other like withered, but still hopeful, clapping hands, remembering what there was to love, to celebrate.

Are you still loving the world; loving this place where you touched down for what seems now like such a short time? Are you showering us all with spangled smiles and sighs of fondness? Do you see how much we worry about the silliest things — power, position, getting ahead — while we are blind to what is right in front of us — wonders, and beloveds at risk: children, the earth, all things innocent?

Are you part of the Great Tender Heart that poured us all out and still longs for her children to know joy? To see the graces? To drink them up? To give birth to peace?

I imagine that is so — that you still long for the best for all of us. In that, you are not alone.