St John Chrysostom said “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were. They are now wherever we are.”

I love these words. I love them especially because, living in India, I have felt so far away from my mother for many, many years. I would have loved to have lived closer to her, and to have had my children know her better. Now that she has left her physical body, I feel closer to her than I have since I was a child, living at home, constantly in her orbit. Because even then, in the same house, even then, as a young child, I sensed that there was a fundamental danger in loving anyone. It is the danger at the heart of any human relationship – the danger of loss, of parting, of death.

And today, as I sit in Delhi keeping Cathleen’s plane in the air (did you know that’s how planes fly? Some mother somewhere in the world is always keeping them aloft – it’s a responsibility we all accept with the birth certificate), I reflect on the way she is repeating my history, as I repeated my mother’s: leaving home, leaving parents, forging far out into the world to make her own destiny, as I did mine, and as Mom did hers. It’s a loss, and yet not a diminishment. Her going enlarges our world because of all she comes back with, all she sends our way, all that she adds to our lives through her work and her thoughts and her friendships and her discoveries.

It’s a practice run for life. We have to learn to let go in these smaller partings to prepare us for the larger, more final ones.

But death, in spite of its finality and implacable reality, turns out to be so overwhelming that we realize, against all reason, that it cannot be final, it cannot be the end. And so I hold close to St John’s words for their truth, for the expression they give of what I have felt in my heart since Mom’s death. She is with me now as she has never been before.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver