I have been sitting with a sentence from Nouwen’s In Memoriam that I am not sure I am yet capable of receiving.
He says, at the end of his account of his mother’s death: By letting her go I did not lose her. Rather, I found that she is closer to me than ever. In and through the Spirit of Christ, she indeed is becoming a part of my very being.
Sixty years is a long time to share a life with someone. And I am not sure letting go is something that happens once, in a moment, at the end of a December day. I think it may be something that happens slowly, over many mornings, as you reach for a presence that is no longer in the room and find something else there instead.
She spent her life teaching people what love looks like when it is not self-protecting. John 13:35 was not a verse she quoted — it was the organizing principle of her days. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. She understood it as a call to visibility — that the love between believers was meant to be the most legible thing about them, the thing the watching world could not mistake for anything else. And she lived that way, in the small moments and the large ones, in the residence halls and the bush churches of Chad and the women’s conferences and the quiet conversations that never made it into any record but that changed the course of lives.
Carol understood the great cloud of witnesses in a way I am only beginning to understand now. She wrote once about singing a hymn in her living room during the pandemic and feeling herself part of an eight-hundred-year choir — St. Francis and ten thousand others, singing across time in the same voice. She was not being poetic. She believed it. The boundary between the living and the departed was, for her, permeable in the way that only love makes permeable.
I think she knew something I am only now beginning to suspect: that what we call losing someone may be, from another angle, a different kind of finding. That the Spirit who unites the Body of Christ does not observe the boundary between December 21 and December 22 the way the rest of us do. That she did not step out of the communion. She stepped further into it.
Nouwen says that in and through the Spirit of Christ, his mother became part of his very being. I do not know what that means yet in the grammar of daily life — in the mornings without her voice and the evenings without her presence. But I am beginning to think that letting her go is not the end of the sentence.
It may be the beginning of a different one.