Henri Nouwen, in the weeks after his mother’s death, came to a conviction that I have been sitting with since December 22. He wrote that to truly mourn someone is not to tell their story over and over, not to place photographs on the wall or visit a stone in a cemetery. It is something more difficult and more alive than any of those things. It is, he said, making her a participant in God’s ongoing work of redemption — allowing her, through the grief, to continue dispelling darkness and drawing us toward light.
I have been thinking about what that means for Carol.
Because the work she did was never really hers to begin with, and the pattern of it started long before most people begin thinking about ministry at all. She was a child when she organized a vacation Bible school for the kids who lived on her road — not because anyone asked her to, but because it was simply what you did when you had something worth sharing. She memorized one hundred verses so she could attend a Christian summer camp, her older sister helping her through them one by one. The zeal was not manufactured. It was constitutive — part of who she was before she had language for it.
And she never stopped. Through every church we attended, in every season of life, she found a way to serve. The women in Chad who gathered around her in those years without electricity, without comfort, without any of the things we tell ourselves we cannot do without — she was not the source of what they received. She was the vessel. The Bible studies she led in Chad, and later the ministry opportunities that took her to Ecuador and South Africa — all of it carried the same message, the one she returned to her entire life: that God’s love is not a doctrine to be grasped but a reality to be lived in, the motivation for everything we do and the safe place we return to in everything we suffer.
Then came thirty years of young women filing through her office at two different colleges. Hundreds of them. She knew their names. She knew their struggles. She stayed in their lives long after they graduated — through letters, through phone calls, through the social media posts she was still writing in the final months of her life. The work never stopped because she never stopped. She organized. She mentored. She wrote. She loved. She had taken John 13:35 not as a verse to admire but as a life to inhabit — By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another — and she inhabited it with a thoroughness that left little room for anything else.
Nouwen says that mourning, when it is real, allows the one we have lost to continue that work in us. Not as memory. As presence. The ongoing work of redemption does not require her physical voice to continue — it requires only that we remain open to the same Spirit through whom she always worked.
I find I am still learning what that means. But I believe she is still in it.