She taught me most things I know that are worth knowing.
That is not sentiment. That is the considered judgment of sixty years of paying attention. She taught me what fierce love looks like when it is not afraid of cost. She taught me what it means to uproot a family and carry three children to a country most people could not find on a map, and to build a life there without complaint and without electricity and with a joy that was not manufactured. She taught me what it looks like to give thirty years to young women who were not your own daughters and love them as if they were. She taught me what it is to write — to take the ordinary moments of a day and hold them up to the light until something true appears in them.
But more than any of those specific things, she taught me a theology. She did not call it that. She simply lived it, and I learned it by proximity. The center of everything she believed and taught and spoke and wrote was this: that God’s love is not a sentiment or a doctrine or a comfort reserved for the crisis moment. It is the ground we stand on, the air we breathe, the only adequate motivation for the life we are given. She carried that message to Chad and Ecuador and South Africa. She carried it to the residence halls and the chapels of two colleges. She carried it to the graduates she stayed in touch with for decades after they left her care. It was, in every sense, her core message — and she never found reason to move on from it.
All of that was her life teaching me.
And now Nouwen says I must be patient and allow her who taught me so much by her life to teach me even more by her death. I confess I am not sure I am ready to be taught this particular lesson. It arrives differently than the others. The others came with her voice in them. This one arrives in silence.
But I am beginning to think the silence is the lesson. The silence is what she could not give me while she was here — not because she withheld anything, but because her presence filled the rooms so completely that there was no room for this particular kind of quiet. And in the quiet, I am finding that certain things become visible that the noise of sixty years of beautiful living kept just out of sight.
I do not know yet what she is teaching me by her death. I suspect it will take longer than I think, and arrive more quietly than I expect.
But I knew her well enough to know she would not leave me without something still to learn.