The Tao gives birth to all beings,
nourishes them, maintains them,
cares for them, comforts them, protects them,
takes them back to itself,
creating without possessing,
acting without expecting,
guiding without interfering.
That is why love of the Tao
is in the very nature of things.
–Tao Te Ching, Ch. 51 (transl. Stephen Mitchell)
And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.
–John 6:39
The death of a loved one casts a long shadow. It covers us and our entire lives, makes it hard to see where we are or where we’re going. The shadow it casts is also long in duration – it lingers long after the person we’ve lost is gone, and long after the world around us has moved on, moved forward, and expected us to do the same.
Grief, in its persistence, can feel an awful lot like the nights around the Winter Solstice – the longest nights of the year, when the darkness seems least likely ever to end and the dawn least likely ever to arrive. Seen through our grief, these are the nights of confusion, inner turmoil, and fear, the dark times of the soul when the night is all-enveloping and the way forward seems lost to us.
My mom passed away earlier this year. It’s been one of the hardest times of my life, although most days I try – for others’ sake, especially – to put a good face on things while I go about my business. It seems too much to ask, most of the time, that those around me share in my own personal sorrow and ongoing sense of loss. But there’s no doubt that her death, and her absence, has affected every single day since, in ways both large and small – in ways that I can easily recognize and ways that I can’t yet clearly see.
It’s really hard to write about it, too, because I feel like I can never do the topic justice. Like me, my mom was a writer – a journalist by training – and we shared a common need to tell our stories with our words, to grasp at the ungraspable mysteries of life through language. She had moved on from full-time newspaper work several years ago, but she was always a writer and a reporter at heart, with a true knack for getting others to open up and share. On top of her day job and her volunteer work at church and elsewhere, she somehow still managed to write occasional articles for several local publications. I was always amazed at how much she could do.
She would talk sometimes about needing to slow down – she was already a cancer survivor several years ago – but there was still so much she wanted to do, and so many people who looked to her for help and support. She really was one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. Until her final round of health problems arrived on the scene – last autumn, about half a year before she died – she seemed pretty much unstoppable, always full of determination and life and creativity and love.
She was always looking for new ways to express herself, and during the last couple of years she had talked about starting a blog. She and I had even talked about launching our sites at the same time, but the right time never seemed to come. One or the other of us was always too busy with work, or dealing with some other concern. Now the moment has passed forever, and it’s something we’ll never get to work on together. It makes me sad to realize it, though it’s also given me new impetus to write.
Part of the reason this site exists now, I suppose, is because I’m trying to hold on to some aspect of her by holding up my side of our informal pact to write and tell some stories about life and living. Whether or not she can still support me in the venture from where she is now remains to be seen, but I kind of suspect she will. She was the sort of person who, when she set her mind to something, tended to find a way.
She died in the springtime, in that bright morning season – right on the cusp of Easter, in fact, with the paschal mystery hanging like a mist in the air. But the shadow of her death, like the night of the Winter Solstice, has stretched long across this year, for me and my family, and I know it stretches further still. I can’t really see past it yet, can’t see out past the edge of this dark valley to where the landscape opens up again.
Karl Rahner writes about making a home for ourselves in our uncertainty, about dwelling in “the night that is our real home.” And I know, in some sense, that this year is no different. I know, on some level, that this present sojourn in the “valley of the shadow” is a time rich with meaning and messages, a time when the field of my life, fallow as it seems, is being readied and prepared for something new.
It’s also been a time of greater honesty and openness with those closest to me, including a deepening of family connections. It’s not that we weren’t all close before, but my mom was, in some ways, the knot at the center of it all, holding separate strands together. She always knew what was going on in each of her children’s lives – because she talked to us, and because she really listened. She could tell just by your voice on the phone how your day had gone, and she always knew when to drop a simple greeting card in the mail, “Love, Mom” scrawled at the bottom in her unmistakable handwriting.
Without her being there, at the heart of our family, we’ve had to learn to listen to each other in new ways, to see each other and allow ourselves to be seen. I know this year has drawn us closer – in part through our shared grief and mourning – and I’m grateful for that closeness, even though it hasn’t been easy.
I’ve been finding a lot of solace in poetry, both ancient and modern, and several times now I’ve revisited Rumi’s profound advice on learning to be “grateful for whatever comes” (the translation here is by Coleman Barks).
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
In the dark and shadow times of our lives, it’s hard to know which way is up, or which way is out, or how long till the morning comes. But I do know I’m not the only one here. I know that everywhere I look, the people I meet have all been touched by sorrow and loss. Just as I’ve found myself opening up and growing closer to my father and my sisters during this time, I’m also trying not to brush aside too quickly, or to ignore, the brokenness of the people all around me.
We’re all of us damaged goods, one way or another, broken open by life, sorrows pouring forth. It’s something we usually do our best to hide, and I suppose that’s natural. We all want the world to see our strength, our skill, our resilience.
But sometimes, every now and then, maybe we’ll learn something valuable if we’re willing to share our weakness with each other, too. Maybe, with our guard let down – if only temporarily – we’ll begin to recognize just how much we have in common and how interconnected we actually are. And when, after the long cold night is over, when the sun does finally rise again, maybe we’ll look around and realize that, even in our darkest hour, we were never really alone at all.