Gratitude seems like an odd thing to have felt in the midst of such wrenching pain, but it was a continuous thread throughout the love room years. Sometimes, it showed up as a piercing beauty of the natural world that cut through the fog of loss. At other times, it was an acute and visceral joy at being with family, or returning to home ground, or penning the small notes to my aunt. Often, the gratitude occurred neck and neck with grief.  I wondered if perhaps, in the life-quake of loss, the world’s everyday beauties and gifts get exposed for the bits of Mystery they surely are.

Here’s a little note from the 3rd year of the love room’s unfolding….

“Tonight I am loving the owls and their raspy-throated calls, a sky that sizzles with stars, crickets ringing all around the house—and having waited for you. Whatever rough edges this—the love room—has pressed into the tender tissues of my life, I am nothing but glad. Some happy chance has landed me at the love room door, and I have stepped right in.”

As winter approaches, I like the dark times. Before light, before all the colors come back. When wildness skitters into hidden places before the sun, and Bodi follows scent trails into the brush.

This morning we walk down to the lake head where three loons float high in the water, still only shadows in the fog. At the little store, two men chat, drink first coffees from paper cups, cigaret-grizzled voices bantering. Bodi visits, hopes for dropped crumbs. Across the road, 10 crows are raucous, flap up out of newly bare tree branches, settle back again. We watch them for a while.

And then the first light comes. Tree colors blush into the lake.

But I miss the shadowy world. I miss missing you. I liked being broken open and pressed down, down onto that dull blade of loss. I liked the quivering jelly-fleshed realness. The mystery breathing down my neck. I liked my heart wrenched open, and the flood, the sea of feelings washing over me.

I liked the sinking down.

Now, I’m okay, I guess. I’m getting used to the blanketed everydayness of you being gone. This morning I love the beauty of first light, the colors coming back to trees, to the water, the sand. My body emerging out of shadows.

But the longing lingers for those darker times when I was still waiting for you.

The rupture of the love room after my aunt died lead me to explore my identity: who was I, if not her niece? What had our family lost, in losing her? Who would remember what we had been, if she was gone? And how would we go forward, alone? How would I go forward, alone?

I’m not sure why this search for identity erupted from the chaos of loss. I had a happy life: a circle of friends I had known for years; a small and close community; a sweet place to live; a job I loved; daughters who lived nearby. But my aunt’s death shifted a foundation stone upon which my okayness in the world had been built, and I was adrift.

In her blog on being a young widow, Emily Clark writes: “There is a startling identity vacuum that accompanies loss…..At best I was broken. At worst, I didn’t exist at all.” When my friend Eleanor lost her husband of 50 years, she went to the grocery store after the funeral, and came home with nothing. She didn’t know what to buy, she said. So much of her shopping had revolved around what her husband liked; what they had liked, together. It took her several trips before she could buy something for just herself to eat.

I think that, in some mysterious way, our skin, our whole being, is married to who and what we love. The love room becomes a place where we sink roots, share habits, learn to trust what’s around us. Our identity doesn’t stand alone; it is shored up and anchored by those who share our lives.

I’m curious about how others handle this unraveling of identity in the aftermath of loss –

In charting each step of these after-years, maybe I’ve laid down a map—small footsteps of a lurching heart after the firestorm of loss. Some have been sweet; some grueling. Some, pressed so close to Mystery, I could barely breathe. Some, lost, even though I’ve tried to keep track.

***

This whole unfolding of what comes after love and loss has been so much more than I can say. Almost more than I can bear, though the bearing is an odd, joyous tenderness I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

***

There is this trail I am laying down, this packet of notes: small, rounded pebbles of patience you could travel across, if only you would.

One of the hardest things was being patient with the process of loss after my aunt died. No matter how tired I felt sometimes with the gray cloud or the wrenching loss or the social inconvenience of grief, I could not rush things along or stop paying attention. Even when I came to what seemed like an “end,” both to the process and the writing, something kept drawing me on – my heart kept lurching in her direction – the little letters kept wanting to be written. I decided to keep watch, to jot down what was unfolding and see where it led. I began to trust the process, even though it felt long and repetitive. I found that grief had a timing of its own, and I wanted to follow that ragged, luminous trail to whatever the end of the journey turned out to be.