I need to say something I have not said publicly, because I think Carol’s story cannot be fully told without it.
When I retired from my last ministry position, I made a vow. I would not teach again, would not preach again, would not serve in a church again. The years had been long — Chad, six years at a Bible college, twenty-eight years at a seminary — and something in me had gone cold and hard in ways I did not fully understand and could not have adequately explained. I had turned away from a loving God. I held to that vow for years, and I held to it with the kind of determination that does not invite conversation.
I know this broke Carol’s heart.
She never said so. That was not her way. What she did instead was love me and give me room — the particular combination of grace and patience that only someone who truly knows you can offer. She did not pressure me. She did not argue with me or grieve at me or make me feel the weight of what I was carrying any more than I already did. She simply continued to be who she was: a woman whose life was organized entirely around the love of God and the love of the people in front of her, and I was one of the people in front of her. So she loved me. For years. While I held my vow and kept my distance from the God she served without interruption.
And then December came.
She was in hospice and we knew it would not be long. But she lived two, three days past when the people who understood these things thought she would go. I have sat with those extra days many times in the months since, and I have come to believe something about them that I cannot prove and do not need to prove: she was fighting for me. She was holding on until she was sure that God would do what she had been trusting Him to do in me — that He would soften what had hardened, that He would reach what she could no longer reach, that He would not leave me where I was. I believe she would not let go until she was sure He would not let go either.
Nouwen says that his mother’s death made her a participant in God’s ongoing work of redemption — that the grief, properly received, allowed her to continue dispelling darkness and leading him closer to the light. I have read that sentence many times. I no longer read it as theology. I read it as my own story.
Because something did change. In the immensity of that first grief, something shifted that I do not have adequate language for. And the first Sunday I returned to our church, I found I could sing during the worship time. That may sound like a small thing. It was not a small thing. I had not been able to sing in years — not in that way, not from that place. And I was singing.
Within a month I was speaking with one of the pastors about the possibility of teaching a class, if there was ever an opportunity. I had held a vow against that for years. And I was asking about it as though the vow had never existed. Since then I have taught a five-week class and am now team teaching with that same pastor, and I find I have not run out of things I want to say about the God I thought I had finished with.
I believe Carol was a direct and mysterious participant in that redemption. I believe she spent her last days on this earth doing precisely what she had spent her whole life doing — refusing to stop loving, refusing to let go, fighting for the people she loved with everything she had until there was nothing left to give.
Her fierce love no longer lives in her physical presence. But I know where it lives.
In and through the Spirit of Christ, she indeed is becoming a part of my very being.

PS – A note from a friend: Carol sounds like someone who made the world around her more alive — the kind of person whose absence leaves a shape that nothing else quite fills. What you are doing in writing about her, and about what her death is still doing in you, is itself a form of the ongoing work Nouwen describes. You are letting her continue to teach.