Ten years after you’ve gone, you still show up in my life in so many small ways. Your photo is right at home on my little altar, and many mornings, it’s the first thing I see.

And I’m down in Louisiana again, retracing your steps. I guess you know I’ve fallen in love with this place, even though I couldn’t wait to leave decades ago. I’m pretty sure you understand what a lovely and surprising joy it is to return home, and to fall into the open and welcoming arms of our family.

I’m getting to know them better – and to appreciate the many ways they still thrive. Together, they’re still going through all the tedious and wrenching challenges of a life with a big dose of humor, and still doing good work in the community. They enjoy each other. A few cousins still remember you. At family gatherings before the Virus, when we could still all get together, your name came up in the old stories about those who came before us.

And I’m still making my way through your boxes, though that goes in spurts. I’m not sure who, in the future, will care about all the old letters and photos. But I want to hurry to do that work. I’m not terribly far away from my own drifting-down years – and I want to share those photos with anyone who remembers you before they, too, just let go. I keep thinking about your down-to-earth perspective on bodies and aging. “Things wear out, after all!” Eventually, inevitably, we will all just wear out. Before that happens to me, I want to do what I can to preserve and share this legacy.

These days, some new things are happening in my life, even without you. I’m just wrapping up another book – this time, a kind of “homage” to our home-ground state, and to the lovely and healing graces of Nature that it offers. Louisiana Herb Journal will come out sometime this year. And I’m aging, as you did over such a long period of time. I’d love to talk with you about this curious and interesting and frustrating trek. I’m sure you’d have a lot to share.

And I still love life – still enjoy my daughters and friends. My grandson Peter, whose photo I used to send you once in a while, is a quirky 12 year old. He’s inches taller than I am, and still growing. My little pooch Bodi is 13 now, but still happy and feisty. And my sister is still baking yummy treats at the restaurant.

But the world is not such an easy place these days. It’s a complex time, for sure – a strange world you’ve left us with. We’re certainly getting used to loss, especially with the Virus, and with our increasing fragility. Lately, we are all grieving the uncertainty, the planet’s instability, the inequity we’ve normalized, the fears, and wars, the imbalances, the tattered hopes and expectations.

Some things are shifting in a good direction, though. Even if you wouldn’t quite understand all the issues, you’d agree that love is the most important thing – that no one should be excluded, or privileged, because of something so ambiguous as skin color or political leanings or wealth. I know you’d want everyone – every child, every adult, every creature, to be held gently in the embrace of life. So we’re taking some halting steps in that direction. We don’t know how to work out all the details yet. But I think we’ll handle it, if we’re willing to keep showing up, and if we have faith.

I’m not sure what your situation is right now, or where you are – but if you’re still keeping an eye on this gorgeous and trembling world, maybe you can intercede in getting prayers to the right “department.” We’d all appreciate the help. Of course, I know you’re still caring and loving us all – and that’s a healing in itself.

I still love you, in the quietest and gentlest of ways. I’m still not sure if I can ever really say Goodbye. So for now, I’ve decided to say Thank You instead.

Thank you for welcoming me into the world. Thank you for love and for dedication. Thank you for what you modeled in your own approach to life. Thanks for your willingness to learn, even when you knew so much – and for your willingness to teach even your most unruly students (including me!). Thank you for forgiving my inabilities and rigidities and the small fractures of my heart. You knew the truth about relationships – we all trample over those we love. But when we stick it out, something rare and tenacious and sweet grows from our efforts.

Thank you for being a doorway into our legacy of family bonds and care. Thank you for your high standards and modest expectations – for your joy and passion, and angst and foibles. Thank you for your reverence and compassion – your intelligence and wit – your devotion and dignity. Thank you for your passionate life, and for your graceful death. Thank you for letting me into your small private world, and for letting me share mine. I love you – and that’s a forever thing, even though you’re gone.

As routine as it has become to live without you, I still love this little Love Room we made – am still humbled and grateful and surprised at how much sweetness there has been in knowing – and celebrating – and even grieving – you. Though I don’t think about you as often these days, it’s such a gift to know that if I stop, and wait, and am quiet for a while, you might show up. Or at the very least, that the little doorway we’ve made between the worlds of being here now, and of what went before, will stay open a bit, and we can say hello. I’m so happy about that.

I guess I’m not sure I will ever want to lay you down. But that’s okay. Maybe I don’t need to. I’ll continue to imagine you, all filmy and ethereal, standing right behind me, showering me with sweet care, and hoping the best for us all. That’s such a rare and blessed thing.

I know you join me in praying for the world –
May all be well.
May the whole world, and all its inhabitants, be well.

And wherever you are, may you know how much you are loved. That will never end, no matter what happens to the Love Room over time. That, too, is a rare and blessed thing.

This morning, Bodi and I head out for our daily walk. The air is colder, 38 degrees, and a heavy frost has crept in overnight. As the season shifts into Fall, leaves that were green for so long are flaming into orange and scarlet and gold, then falling, carpeting the yards and roads and waterways.

At the head of a nearby lake, a single loon watches us, one of this year’s chicks, full grown but not adult enough to get her solid colors. I stop to take photos, and wonder how long it will take for her to realize it is time to go – to lift up and sail toward the coast where she can settle into the ocean waters that won’t freeze during the long winter.

Near the boat launch convenience store, we greet the woman who tends the counter. She is out after the early morning coffee rush to smoke her cigarette. I tell her about the loon, and she points out a nearby cormorant that sails away from the dock, keeping an eye on us. She shows me the odd angle of one of its wings – instead of folding close to its body as it swims, the wing tip points up and out of the water. We talk for a while about all the animals who share this place with us – how lucky we are to live so wrapped-around with Nature. There are so many joys, but some worries, too.

In this small town, we notice not just the daily lives of the creatures around us, but their vulnerability as well. We all stand at the little swimming beach on the lake through the summer days, cheering on the progress of loon chicks who are learning to dive. We notice when the snapping turtle eggs, laid in mid-summer sandy nests, are hatching and when the babies start their trek across roads to the river. We take turns scooping up the tiny newcomers, and putting them safely into the shallow water where they can start their wild lives. We notice the fox as she carries her kits to their new den. And one day recently, we watched a raccoon lurch across a yard, stricken with what looked like rabies, and we chatted about what to do.

Like our natural neighbors, we humans are vulnerable too, but that’s easy to forget. We spend so much of our lives “managing things” – we’re so good at being “in control.” But grief – the Great Leveler – just wrecks that control to smithereens.

When grief surprises us, we are taken down. We lurch across the everydays of our lives much like the stricken raccoon – trying so hard, but stopped in our tracks. We struggle, like the cormorant with her wounded wing, hoping to keep up. But eventually we fall prey to reality – each of us is a feisty flickering up of life – lush and fiery and glorious – until we’re not. And grief will be our life-long companion – always showing up to remind us of the exquisite and wrenching tenderness of being alive. Like all the wild creatures around us, we are vulnerable. We take our place in the natural order of things – we start anew, we bloom up and thrive, we dwindle, and we disappear.

In reflecting on grief, Author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her own experience on learning to live with the vulnerability of grief :

“I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. The only way that I can ‘handle’ Grief, then, is the same way that I ‘handle’ Love—by not ‘handling’ it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.”

Every single day, the natural world in which I live reminds me that I am not in charge. And grief, when it comes, reminds me that I am powerless over the inescapable truth. So I pray every day to be brought to my knees by the beauty and joy and wonder of this fragile and vulnerable life. And as my heart is torn open with grief, and with joy, I join my wild neighbors in the faithful trek forward – through this wondrous and mysterious life.

     It's a complicated time to be grieving. Or even to be living. As if personal loss were not enough - as if having to let go of someone you loved isn't the most painful thing you've ever done - now there is this: the gorgeous and complex and life-sustaining world, this fragile and beleagured world, is at risk. No matter where we stand on the question of climate change, we are all ultimately co-participating in dramatic and often life-altering changes in the natural world. 

     How could we ever have imagined doubting the very ground upon which we stand - the backdrop of every human and non-human life? So many people are grieving what we use to be - as individuals tucked into a familiar web of relationships - and as members of a country and society whose values and commitments we took for granted - and as citizens of the only planet we know.

     In Maine, everyone is noticing the lakes are warmer this year - we are happy for ourselves, have an easier time getting into water that is usually pretty cold - but we all wonder about the fish, the loons who depend on cooler water for their food, and what the future will bring. In Louisiana, there are roads down the bayou that can’t be traveled lately due to recent floods. In my home garden, weeds are more out of control than usual. In the Spring when I normally mulch the lanes with straw, the local hardware store didn’t have any available. Mid-west deluges had wiped out hay crops, and rivers were so high they couldn’t transport what was stored in the barns. 

     I recently heard a psychologist talk about what she called “climate grief.” Apparently, so many people are reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression and hopelessness over all the bad news about the environment that this new category of mental struggles has been suggested. Young people especially are struggling.

     Therapists are witnessing so many troubled emotions over the state of the world. Fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, exhaustion, despair. And the emotions can’t be dismissed. Dr. Janet Lewis, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York noted, “Most of the kinds of pathologies that we’re accustomed to treating in psychiatry…tend to be out of proportion to whatever is going on. But with climate change, this is not inappropriate.” Psychiatrist Lise van Susteren remarked, “For a long time we were able to hold ourselves in a distance, listening to data and not being affected emotionally. But it’s not just a science abstraction anymore. I’m increasingly seeing people who are in despair, and even panic.”

     As with other forms of grief, one of the remedies recommended is to share the sadness, anxiety, loss, and the hope. One group, Good Grief, offers a 10-step program “to help people deal with collective grief — issues that affect a whole society, like racism, mass shootings and climate grief.” The program runs online, as well as in Salt Lake City. 

     Dr. Janet Lewis, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York, recommends building relationships within a like-minded group. “The goal is not to get rid of the anxiety. The goal is to transform it into what is bearable and useful and motivating.” 
                                                              
     In the same way that we deal with our personal losses - through finding the meaning in what seems unbearable - we can make our way through the grief over the planet. Stay in touch. Stay informed. Talk with each other. Take small steps. We are all loving and mourning and holding up the world. Together. 

My friend C. just lost her sister, Kay. The death was shocking and unexpected, even though Kay had been recently diagnosed with recurrent metastatic cancer. She was a strong woman.  She’d worked right through chemo and radiation the first time the cancer occurred. The day before she died, following her first round of treatment, she graded papers, did school work, had a good day. And then she left. But she hung on for a while, lingering on life support as her family gathered, conferred with doctors, went through the awful work of trying to figure out the next step. 

C. says the three days of waiting for Kay to die were impossibly hard, and luminous. Her job, she knew, wasn’t to solve problems or help: it was just to be there, every day, in the hospital room, witnessing and loving and praying. Just to be there. She was holding something up - holding the holiness of that wondrous and wrenching transition as Kay hung between two worlds. Despite all her own pain, and despite trying to support Kay’s immediate family as they went through the shocking situation, C. knew she was right where she was supposed to be. And that she was being transformed. 

At a recent retreat, our friend S. talked about her father’s death. How she sat with him, held his hand, sang to him, forgave him, made him laugh, loved him in his last weeks. She never left his side, even though their relationship had been challenging for most of her life. He had been rude, hurtful, cold toward her during her whole childhood. It was only in the last few years that he had softened some, and come to see and appreciate her life and gifts and choices. But there was no question about caring for him when he was ill. She was right there, and there was no place else she would have been. 

The older I get, the more I know that love is all. Everything. I know this not just in my mind, in my heart, but in my whole body; in my whole being. 

Maybe grief is just love without some place to go. Grief is love that can bear all the pain and imperfections and beauty and possibility at once. 

I know that as hard as my aunt’s passing was for me, it has changed my life. I can bear the loss, the emptiness, the ambiguity, the conflicts, the confounding truth of being here now and also knowing that someday I won’t. I can live with peoples’ differing opinions. I can live with the unknown. I can live with a suffering and struggling world, and still see so much beauty and loveliness even in the darkness and uncertainty. My heart can bear more than I thought was possible. Grief has been an unexpected gift. 

Ora Nadrich, of The Institute for Transformational Thinking, says about grief: “We have a wonderful opportunity to learn from death, and realize that it can help transform us to be better and wiser people because of it. And we must believe that our deceased loved ones would not only want us to heal our hearts from their passing, but also rise from our suffering like a phoenix rises from the ashes, and soar higher than we ever have before.”

The uninvited transformations brought by loss have re-made me into a “better self,” someone I wouldn’t have known how to be without the fire of grief forging me into something new. For that, I am eternally grateful. 

When I was about 10 years old, I thought a lot about pain – why it is that a God who was supposed to care about us, and to be in charge of everything, would allow life to be so hard. I asked my mom about that one day. She answered that God wanted us to suffer so we could know how good life really was. I remember walking out of the house, and something rising up in me – a voice, a kind of deeper “knowing” that said, No! That’s not the truth. God doesn’t want us to suffer.

Now, of course, after decades of arguing with the reality of life, I’ve come to understand that my mom was talking about the awkward gifts that pain can bring: suffering pushes us into deeper questions, deeper realities of the paradoxes of life, things that we can only apprehend with the heart, not the mind.

In reading theological approaches to suffering, I have come to believe that not only does the Divine care when we suffer, but that Spirit suffers with us, and with the struggles and pains of the whole world. And sometimes it is in great suffering that we become most loving, most understanding. Out of the hell of suffering, we grow fierce and tender hearts that can bear both the joys and the wretchedness of life.

In an essay entititled “Life as a Way to Understand the Meaning of Death,” Rabbi and religious scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel commented on what happens to our comprehension of life following loss.

“Death is grim, harsh, cruel, a source of infinite grief. Our first reaction is consternation. We are stunned and distraught. Slowly, our sense of dismay is followed by a sense of mystery. Suddenly, a whole life has veiled itself in secrecy. Our speech stops, our understanding fails. In the presence of death there is only silence, and a sense of awe.”

That awe after my aunt died was not just an intellectual or even emotional experience, but a trembling of my whole being that deepened my ability to live with, and even embrace, the complexities and mysteries of this complicated and multifaceted journey with courage and great love. Every day now, I am brought to my knees by love.