The whole aftermath of my aunt’s death was a confusing and luminous journey. I was swimming in loss. There were waves of letting go, and of holding on. I rose, and sank; surfaced, and dove down. The trek through the love room seemed both holy, and hellish; ragged, and tender. It consumed everything. I wanted to wake up, but I also wanted to sink deeper into dreams, especially if they gave me something of my aunt.

In a way, I was more in touch with the Great Mystery of Being than ever in my life. It was both stunning, and not surprising at all.

Now, I understand that the dizzying shift between wanting to be free, and hoping the love room would never end, was a wrenching and completely natural process. Even after 6 years of my aunt’s death, I’m still not entirely sure that I want to be free.

Here are a couple of letters from the most confusing times –

3/9/12
Getting up from my morning ‘sit’ to write and be quiet, I pick up your shawl to straighten it, and instead suddenly press it to my face, wrap myself up in you.

I am a prisoner of love and grief. Will I never be free? I don’t want to be free! Oh, how long will I be in this impossible, in-between place? No wonder I never remarried! If losing you, my aunt, is so hard, how would I have survived losing a soulmate? Or—maybe that was you, after all: the sister of my soul? And what can I do, but wait for this to play out as it will?

3/21/12
First official day of spring! Along with all the earthy things that are thawing and rising up these days, I seem to be coming out of a hole—the one you left. Maybe it’s just the warmer weather, or the small increase in thyroid hormones, or the tiny dose of antidepressant I’ve been taking for a few months now. But I’m feeling better.

Still, my heart is afraid that means I’m leaving you behind.

The remnants of your life and time are still pressing into mine; your life, still woven into me. But something else is calling: the rest of my own life. And love for this, the world where I’m rooted. I still hope, and dream. I still want things—touch, deep talk, play. I want to see Peter grow and learn. I want to see how my daughters fare as they age. I want to be here if they need someone who holds them dear. I have baskets to make, poems to write, maybe a little book about you.

I belong to the continuing mystery of what will happen to the world. I am still unfolding. Maybe you are, too, in some graced and surprising ways I can’t understand.

Oh, how much I have loved you. But I still want to be free. How can this all be happening at once?

You are still inside everything I do. Inside the bubble of my life, every hard, or strange, or happy, or curious thing. My mind—the data bank of keeping up with things—knows you’re gone. But my body, this map of my whole life, doesn’t believe it at all. Still leans your way. Such a marvelous pain. I don’t know if that will ever go away.

It took a while before I could let the anger in. Once my aunt was gone, I was flooded with all the best memories of her; all her graces and funny quirks, her gifts of spunkiness and wit and awareness. The love room, for a while, was made of spangled and gauzy joys, and of the wretched emptiness she left behind.

But in the second year, I started to notice what had been tucked away: I was mad! My aunt had co-opted my life! She could have been more compliant! She could have been more aware of what it was costing me to help her out. And I was mad at her for living so long! When I “signed up” for managing her care, she was in her 90s. Surely, she could have moved along a bit sooner! I hadn’t counted on 102 years! I had my own life to live, after all! I was busy! I had other people who needed me! I was tired! And she kept bumping up her age-goal – from 100, to 102, 105, 120! What was she thinking?! And not only had that been hard; but now, she was just plain gone! What was I supposed to do with that?!

It shook me, at first, to let the resentment in. I was afraid of what would happen to the luminous space of the love room if it turned out to be complex. But it helped, to let the realness have some space. I had been used up, after all. I had given more than I really could. And even though I would have done it all again, giving voice to the hard and hurt feelings was, as it turned out, another small recognition of a relationship that could bear both the gentle and loving feelings, and the hard and grumpy ones too.

Letting the anger in turned out to be another small grace that didn’t threaten the love room, but strengthened it instead. The following is a little entry from Year 2 of the letters….

9/11/11
I’m finding little bits of niggling anger with you for co-opting my life. You knew I wouldn’t leave. You held on tight. Now I have to go back and see what I’ve given up, and what I can reclaim. There are some things, probably, that are lost forever: possibilities, a certain liveliness I might have had at fifty that has passed me by. I wonder how things might have been if I weren’t so used up. Still, the anger is all tangled with the bright, warm joy of loving you, and the grace of growing deeper into your heart, and mine. Of coming together to build the love room that sheltered what had been delicate and rare, and grew strong and sure and irreplaceable in the close-to-the-bone times. There is that, too.

Now, bit by bit, chore by chore, I am coming back to this body-home, without you. Maybe I’ll find new parts of me, but I am sure even these will be flavored with you. Oh, I have loved you so much. What a grace this has been, the awkward trek through being, and not being, with you.

One thing that struck me, during the love room years, was how unique each relationship really is. My closeness with my aunt was, in some ways, very different from that of any other she might have. Irreplaceable. The following is a little entry from Year 2 of the love room letters…..

10/16/12
How much more about you can I know, now that all the tales, and the people who could tell them, are fading away? I am trying to fill the hole you left. Getting to know the Louisiana family helps some. But it’s really an impossible thing, for who is replaceable, after all? Not one of us. Not one stone or flower or pet. Not one cloud.

One of the hardest things about care-giving is that the responsibility all falls on you. And it’s not just a weight of doing the details; it’s the emotional responsibility of taking care of someone else’s life.

I said to a neighbor, during that time of caring for my aunt, that it was as if I were co-participating in her dwindling years. She might have felt she was alone, but I was going through it, too. My friend Helen agreed when I mentioned that. She had helped her husband through his battle with cancer, and then his own ending time. She had participated in, and carried, her husband’s struggle and death as if it were her own. After he died, there wasn’t just grief, there was exhaustion, too.

For the last several years of my aunt’s life, I wrestled with not only the responsibility of how to get her needs met, but also with ways to shore up her sense of dignity and control. She needed to have choices; she needed to have a sense of what decisions were being made, and what her options were. She needed to feel cared for, and safe.

But I had to balance those with the needs of my own life. And that was hard. At one point, I was going down to Maryland every 3 weeks. I’d catch up on her paper work, get her to medical appointments, clean the apartment, clean the fridge. Then I’d go home, stare at my own messy refrigerator, and wonder how it could be dirty when I’d just cleaned it!

I think that caretakers are, in some ways, the unseen “collateral damage” of elder care. I had laid out my life and taken her into it, carried her along. And while I was so grateful for the chance to grow even closer to her, that opportunity wasn’t without cost.

Here are a couple of entries from Year 3 of the letters….

3/26/13
A letter in the New York Times recently spoke about losing the people you’ve taken care of, and how it drags you down, how it leaves a large hole in your life, one way and the other, both when they’re here, and when they’re gone. Only someone who’s been there—on that rough, impossible road of carrying someone else—can know what it’s like. We are eaten alive. And still, don’t want to be spared, because what would that mean? The end. The end, the end, the end.

A lonely, impossible, oddly graced journey this caring has been, and still is; never, it seems, really over.

There ought to be a place where caretakers can go afterward, to recover; collapse, breathe, without waiting for the phone to announce the next emergency. So far, I haven’t found that. All my beloveds, in one way or another, keep needing more. And you? I guess you don’t need anything from me now. But the hole you left, the wound I fell into for so long, is still raw. I’m not sure what to do about that. For who would choose not to love? And love means being with—no matter what.

Well….for now the day ahead stretches out before me: beeswax melting on the stove for the new, big basket waiting to be sealed; many phone calls from needy students while I’m writing; the pooch, ready for a walk. And, for just this moment, a life in the middle of care, scented with honey and wax.

5/19/13
On the radio today, I heard singer-songwriter Amy Grant tell the story of helping her parents go through their end times—that rough, hard work of the million details, the unrelenting care, the heavy responsibility, doing it all alone. She complained to a friend, who agreed it must be hard, but it was something else, too. “This is the last great gift your parents will give to you,” her friend said. The opportunity to care.

Oh.

What gift would that have been, for me? The chance to work hard, to get over myself, to push through the weight of wounds and what I thought I didn’t get, and just give. To fight for you. To hold up your dignity. To dredge up, out of the bottom of my halting heart, as much love as you needed. To offer what I could. More than I could.

The chance to know you, not just as strong and remarkable, but person to person, heart to heart. To bear your tender vulnerability that needed a hand to hold. You gave me that. The work, and the chance to slip through your careful guardedness and into the juicy center of your heart. And into my own.

When my older daughter read the love room letters, she cried. She kept telling me how sorry she was, that I had suffered so much and she hadn’t known.

I was a little surprised at her reaction. For, even though the loss was wrenching, the love room with my aunt felt like such a great and stunning gift. I never regretted the experience. In fact, I was grateful for it. For over three years, I lived in the ragged territory of being so acutely alive. Not only was the grief acute; everything was acute. The beauty around me, the natural world, the smallest kindnesses from friends, the reintroduction to family, the impossible mystery within which we all live – were intimate and irrefutable. Grief ripped everything into luminous shreds.

Not only was I broken, I was broken open. Loss ripped a hole in the monotony of the daily grind, to wake me up. I entered into an intimacy with the primal paradox of life: we live our wondrous, quirky lives within the confines of death. I loved the Mystery. I loved the deep questions that tore me up. I loved the lingering presence of my aunt. In grieving her, I lived more fully in the impossible truth of existence. Here, and then gone. Joy, and pain. In following the trail of the love room letters, I was tracking down what I needed most – a wrenching realness that fed the depths of my whole being, even in the midst of the shocking wreck of death.

The following is an excerpt from Year 3 of the letters. It was written following the bombing at the Boston Marathon, and describes that experience of both suffering and wonder.

4/16/13
Today, the Boston Marathon bombing.

People are broken in the streets. The world is shuddering. You are forever gone. And still—sun shines, a muskrat slides under the surface of the pond, new leaves have the courage to sprout.

Everything falters; everything thrives. Love breaks, and breaks open. I am wonder and fear, joy and rage, tears and hollowness and lush, ripe fruit. I am both brought to my knees, and racing toward a future as if it were sure.

Oh, how much there is to hold in our shaky hearts. Oh, how our love room with life is both warm and buffeted, shocking and sure. Oh, from wherever you are, show me how to bear all this, for I am a prisoner of irrepressible love for the world, crushed by care that tears me apart.

May we find mercy. May we bow down at the altar of life. May it be so.

In the third year after my aunt’s death, I began to wonder whose life I was living, and whose story I was trying to tell. It occurred to me that much of what poured out in the love room letters were details of my aunt’s life, and mine, interwoven. Sometimes, it was hard to tease the two apart. Here’s an entry that explores that question –

3/28/13 a.m.
Here I am, trying to tell your story. But it isn’t mine to share. I can’t claim you, or even tell the long, rich tale of your life. That belonged to you, and now it’s gone. And maybe none of us can claim the journey we think is ours. We belong to the long, brave flowering of the world, unfolding one battered, stupendous petal at a time. Perhaps we can only hope to bloom in the small bright sun of a life, dance in whatever wind blows our way, dizzy with the wrenching joy of a little time and an overwhelming love.

I can’t go back to what is gone. But your life still shimmers inside me. The tangled trail of our family still twines up all around. I am both what went before, and what presses its tenacious self forward, using this body as a home.

So much falls away. But some things stay. The gauzy, lively room we have made out of love is surely one of those.

During the long trek through the love room after my aunt died, I wanted to be alone. I wasn’t purposefully avoiding friends and family, but I was wrapped up in the muffled fog of loss, and I didn’t want to give that up. When I was quiet, my aunt was there. And nothing seemed more comforting than that.

I was aware of my isolation. But I wanted to give myself, and the presence of my aunt, and the love room as it shifted, time to be what they were – a natural inward-turning in the wrenching wreck of grief. In the love room, I didn’t have to pretend. I didn’t have to be fun, or eager, or resilient, or hearty, or numb. The aloneness was real, and that was just fine with me.

Megan Devine, in her Refuge in Grief website, notes the truth of isolation in times of great loss: “You are alone in your grief. You alone carry the knowledge of how your grief lives in you. You alone know all the filaments of story and of love that fly through you….”

In the solitude of the lingering love room with my aunt, I could face the Mystery in which we all live – and die – as it unfolded inside and around me. But I kept an eye out, and allowed others to watch with me, as I made my way.

Writing the love room letters was one important way I kept track of myself.

Over time, the love room ripened into release, and I gradually took steps to re-enter the world, though it was a new world I entered – one lush with gifts of depth and family and the wrenching, diamond truth of letting go.

The following is a brief entry I made in Year 3 of the Love Room letters –

2/4/14
Today, I think about calling my friend Kathryn, whose mother has recently died, to ask how she is. But I still hesitate to speak, to say anything real about loss, as if words would shatter something. Break right through. If I keep my mouth closed, the sweet loneliness stays intact. If I hold the sorrow inside—a slippery, bitter pill that refuses to melt—I might get to keep you.

A little letter from Year 2

7/17/12
A hot, sticky walk to the pond to watch frogs, then home, sunk low again with loss. I can’t look at the frogs hanging in the cloudy waters without thinking that they’re at risk. What about the sad list of all that is wounded, suffering, gone? How can I look out and see anything but threat?

And what about our young people, who may never see butterflies or whales? Who surely will never know what silence is? Who will grow up afraid of the sun?

In the talk I listened to last week about the state of the oceans and the world, one woman talked about aging — how getting older is always hard because you are losing so many things: abilities, options, friends, family, a place where you’ve lived for so long. We are the first generation, she said, that is also losing the planet — the very earth out of which we were born. Everything we’ve known as the surest home — the loveliness, all the twittering, creaking, scritching, fluty, wild songs that made up the background of our whole time here — going away.

How can I know all these hard things and still leave the door of my heart open? How do I fall in love, over and over, with the life that spreads out in front of me, still rich with possibility, when there is so much to lose? How can I love frogs and bees, whales, dolphins, oceans and air, dark soil and wild herbs, when so much is wounded? And you: How can I love life without you in it? How can I thrill with the moving forward of my own life when yours is fading away?

Still…this morning I watched a mother cardinal sweep out of the underbrush where her babies were hidden, slip over the dewy lawn to perch in the shadows. My mind was crowded with heavy, sad thoughts. Then my eye caught on the curve of her wing, where her dusky breast slips toward red, and fell in love. I don’t know where it came from, that wonder, that startling truth, but it was enough. Undaunted by numbers, statistics, obituaries, fear, it was everything, and enough. The wonder at the heart of all things still lingers, surely, even though you’re gone. Even though everything could be gone.