My wife, Carol, died on the 22nd of December, 2025. We had been married sixty years.
In the weeks after, I found myself returning again and again to a small book by Henri Nouwen called In Memoriam, written after the death of his own mother. It is not long, and it does not try to console in the ordinary ways. What it does instead is trace, honestly and without hurry, the strange work that grief does in a person — the way a death, rightly received, does not so much end a life as change the form of its presence among us.
The reflections that follow were written out of that book, and out of that grief. They are not a biography of Carol, though something of her life comes through them. They are not a eulogy, though I hope they honor her. They are, more than anything, an attempt to pay attention to what her death is still doing — in me, and perhaps beyond me.
I did not write them all at once, and I did not always know where they were going. Nouwen moves through his mother’s death in stages — what she is still doing, what her death is teaching him, what it means to let her go, the choir she has joined, and the hard word that her leaving might somehow be good for us. I followed him through each of those, not because I had arrived where he arrived, but because I needed to walk the road he had walked.
The last of these is the most personal thing I have written. I will let it speak for itself when you come to it.
Carol spent her whole life believing that God’s love was not a doctrine to be admired but a place to live — the ground under everything, the safe place in every sorrow. She built her days around a single verse: By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. She lived that way to the very end, and I have come to believe she is living it still.
These were written slowly, and I am still learning what they mean. But if any of this is of use to you — in your own grief, or your own doubt — then she is still doing what she always did.
And I am glad to have you as a companion on the road.