After almost two years of waiting at the love room door, I was tugged back into life. Part of my attention was still turned toward my aunt, but another part began to lean forward. The following is a little note from those early days of transition from grief into hope.

5/5/12

The thick cloud bank of loss that I’ve been breathing in, drinking up, chewing, and digesting for these many months of you being gone has been world, sustenance, breath.

And now is shifting. Life is calling me back. I want to do some gentle things – pay attention to the garden, poke fingers into dark damp soil, plant a few seeds. Check to see what might be coming up; be excited at what I find. I want to get to know more people, think about the future, clean up and throw things out, and – who knows – maybe find someone to love.

But what will happen to our love room if I slip back into life? Will it hang, suspended, in the ethers of which it was made, gauzy walls flapping in the winds of emptiness? Will it be a little shrine of your life and mine, intertwined, marking the spot where love stretched across the netherworld of the mysteries of being and not?

Or will the shimmery space of our connection do what every real and natural thing must – lay itself down, come apart, offer itself into the air like the apple blossoms that let go of the branch, drift down in a shower of petals with the promise of another life yet to come, another season of fruiting and feast?

I am guessing that’s the truth, for nothing real holds on forever. Everything must give itself over to what can still become.

Life is just too weird for words. Life – and death – astound us. This crazy, motley journey of living – and of dying – can seem pretty ridiculous at times.

And then, when grief seems impossible to navigate, humor has a way of piercing through the ridiculousness and taking us back into what’s possible. We can make it through. Nothing can totally crush us. We’re part of the unfolding mystery of the world. We’re stronger than we think. And we’re really not alone.

One of my fondest memories of the time after my mom died was of being at the funeral home before the viewing hours with my sister, Celeste, and my daughters, Alison and Lara. We were all gathered around my mom’s coffin, and the funeral home manager was giving us time to be alone before he brought the visitors in. Standing around my mom’s body, we began talking about how “snarky” she could be – sharing some of the things that drove us all crazy and were so funny. I can’t remember what set us off, but we started giggling together. At that point, the funeral attendant opened the doors to let people in, but when he saw us, he thought we were sobbing. He backed out, slammed the door, and left us alone. We cracked up even more. We kept trying to stop laughing, but every time he opened the door again and then raced out, we’d start chortling. We were wiping our eyes; my sister was pinching her cheeks to make herself stop laughing. When we could finally get some control, we all agreed that my mom would have loved this, and been right in there laughing with us.

Much research in the last few years has focused on the importance of humor in a grieving process. A blog, The Utility of Laughter in Times of Grief, lists some of the impacts humor can have. Physical effects can include easing physical pain, strengthening the immune system, decreasing stress, elevating mood, and decreasing depression and anxiety. Emotional effects include putting things in perspective, enhancing problem solving, triggering creativity, allowing one to take her/himself less seriously, and gaining a sense of control over circumstances. Social impacts include increased bonding among family and friends, diffusing conflicts, and boosting morale.

An article by Mark Liebenow in the Huffington Post of May 2016 reminds us that humor can be sacred as well. “Laughter is a door that creates a crack in our rational mind and allows insights to enter in.”

Of course, sometimes humor is just another form of denial. “Gallows humor,” an avoidance or trivialization of the seriousness of the situation, is an attempt to sidestep the wretchedness of grief. But when humor bubbles up spontaneously, and especially when it’s shared, a gentle and healing light is shed on the impossible reality of loss. The gifts of love linger, no matter what. Leibenow notes that every culture has its clowns or fools who remind people that “there is more going on in life than what they can see.” Laughter and humor can be gentle doors back into the life we once loved, even when our beloveds are gone.

As loss began to loosen its tenacious grip, a visit to a friend’s camp on the Maine mid-coast allowed time for reflecting back on the journey of grief. Here is a little letter from Year 3 of the letters.

8/7/13
This morning Bodi and I walked through raggedy unmown fields that were heavy with dew, honeybees rising up from wildflowers in the early sun. At Eleanor’s, there were boisterous dog greetings, and time for tea and chatting.

We talked about aging and what to do about the future, how to get our needs met, and about loneliness – the scary fact of bad things happening when there’s no one to help. And all the responsibility, and who might share it as we age. And about grief, how to let everything go and still love the life you have. Eleanor said her sister is grieving after suffering a loss, is overwhelmed.

I remember the overwhelming part after you’d left. I think I am coming out of it now, though there is a limit to how much I can do without needing recovery time. Still, something of that lowness has loosened up, is coming to a kind of close.

This writing, too, might be rounding out. Here I am, at Eleanor’s, where I came in those hardest times to take breaks from the work that was endless and all the phone calls that were scary. After you’d gone, I came here to recover, slog through the grayest of months. To wait for little touches of the love room, the sweetness and surprises of you showing up.

Here, the quiet pond lapping over itself, owls booming in the night, the veeries and osprey, eagles and loons, the ocean at Owl’s Head, wide green fields, the wild silence – all teased something apart in me, helped soothe and soften the impossible truth of the end. Your end. Here, something was still good, alive. Lush, and trembling.

Now I paddle out over warm amber water, dip a hand into the pond, and somehow, maybe, the joy that wells up in my own life spills over into the well of all lives loved, especially yours. My life is still breathing into the love room, keeping you afloat.

I guess one could say that the whole love room experience was a kind of luminous denial.
My mind could understand the unavoidable trajectory of a limited, physical life, and its end. But my emotions, and my body, didn’t believe it at all.

I had an anatomy teacher once who told us that we were all made of stardust – that we have taken in the universe – and become it. I think the love room is like that too – what we’ve participated in, what we’ve loved, becomes part of our flesh, blood, mind, heart, maybe even spirit.

So how in the world are we supposed to believe that someone who’s gone is really – gone? And what are memories, anyway? Aren’t they just the left over stuff of what we’ve lived in, and through and with? And what’s the thin line between denial and hope?
The following are a couple of little letters from Year 3 –

5/10/13
At the pond, geese still nest despite rising waters.This morning, the mother lifts up, fluffs feathers, resettles. The male hunches nearby, will help her out once the chicks arrive. She’ll be hungry, though, by the time the eggs are done, and busy, shepherding babies all over their new world. And then a long flight home.

Everything pulls away, finishes, flies off. But here I am, not quite leaving so many things, including you.

I am still the student of the mysterious fact of love, of living and not living, of what to do with care when the one I cared for so fiercely is gone. How does one ever learn this impossible thing?

5/11/13
Walking this morning in a hard rain, and getting soaked. In the woods, I lean against a little tree for a moment, sniff its wet bark. It has no leaves, no branches, only one thin, tall trunk, stretching up.

This tree still has a love room with the sky. The habit of love, of reaching out, lingers long, I guess.

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.