Where I See Aunt Barb

Through breathing tubes and fatigue and the cruel pain insisting its way around the edges of Oxycontin, Aunt Barb looked up at me and grinned with a practiced mischief. Her eyes shined. "Take a look at the sign behind you, Corey. Tell me what it says." 

I turned and looked at the sign, a small, wooden, hand-made contraption leaning on her bookcase, and saw just a jumble of symmetry. But the letters on the sign did remind me of visiting Israel a few years earlier where I had seen street signs printed in three languages at once: English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The letters of two of those languages were undecipherable, so they looked to me then like a series of lines and curves wandering themselves into words I could not read. That was my first thought when I looked at Aunt Barb's sign.

But then I looked again, letting my eyes relax to see the spaces instead of the lines, and it was easy. "It says Jesus," I said. "It says Jesus."

Aunt Barb laughed a little. "You saw it," she said. "Very good." Her mission was accomplished, and her smile no longer had mischief. It was now just the pure smile of a person who loved me and was pleased.

That was the last conversation I would ever have with my Aunt Barb. A few minutes later our visit ended. I hugged her and told her I loved her, and my mom and I left the home she shared with my Uncle Phil. Then two weeks later we got the phone call we knew would soon come.

Since my visit with Aunt Barb I have been thinking about what remains in the physical world of a person when that person's life has ended. I thought about it yesterday when I sat in Uncle Phil's home again with him and his daughters, my cousins Vicki and Sue. I was awed by their generosity in their grief process, opening themselves to welcome a visit from my brothers, mother, and me less than a week after losing wife and mother, three days after a tough Christmas for the family, two days after what would have been Aunt Barb's 80th birthday on December 26, in the early afternoon of December 28, the day my uncle and aunt would have celebrated their 62nd anniversary had cancer not stolen her health.

My uncle and his family had negotiated so many days in a row feeling the profound absence of the woman who had been the center of gravity for the family, the monarch (according to my uncle), the source of so much warmth and light and love that we would have understood if a visit felt like too much, but they were there to visit with us, to greet us with and share the warmth and light and love that was so familiar. It was a tremendous gift at a hard time, but it's who they are, so it wasn't really a surprise.

Our visit had measures of laughter and silence, a few tears, stories that stretched back and forth over a century and six generations. My Uncle Phil shared memories of Aunt Barb and stories about my dad, his brother, with a wisdom and a perspective only an older brother can have. My younger brother shared insight about my father only a loving son can have. My cousin Vicki shared the beautiful story of the last days and moments of my aunt's life with a comfort that only people of faith can have. My ever-handsome uncle held out his arms to my older brother, the most Harbaugh-looking of our bunch, and said "take a look at what you'll look like when you're 80," and my older brother smiled and said "I'll take it." My cousin Sue shared the perspective she's gained from grief since losing her husband in June, and how the strength has flowed back and forth in the family, and will continue. My uncle talked about unconditional love, a phrase that men perhaps didn't use 100 years ago, but had been passed to him as a legacy from his Grandpa Allen and had been shared in our family ever since.

As my cousins spoke I saw part of the answer to my question about what remains in the physical world after the loss of a loved one. In the case of the loss of a parent, a favorite scientist writer Lewis Thomas said in his beautiful essay "Death in the Open" that life is passed to children in very physical ways. I saw in both Vicki and Sue so many features of my aunt, their mother, both physical and spiritual. My aunt is there in their features and mannerisms of beauty and grace. On my uncle's finger another physical sign: I saw a wedding ring that was too small for him: almost certainly the unbroken circle that symbolized their love that had graced her finger since 1956.

I know much of the question about where to look for Aunt Barb now had been answered decades ago by my aunt and uncle in their faith journey. My aunt had dedicated her life to her faith in Jesus and shared that faith journey with my uncle. He knew where her soul went, and with a kind and gentle firmness shared that he wasn't much interested in what the scientists had to say about it.

When I visited with Aunt Barb two weeks before her passing I shared some of what I heard as wisdom from a sermon at a funeral for a co-worker. The priest read from the passage in First Corinthians that I had heard many times at weddings, but never at a funeral: "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love." The priest said love is the greatest of these three because at the end of a person's life, the faith journey for that person has ended, and we don't have to hope for that person any more because hope is fulfilled in the promise of faith. But love doesn't end. It goes on. After a person has died the love shared endures. I shared that I still feel my father's love with as much strength today as I ever did when he was alive. That's what makes love so great.

I think Aunt Barb took such joy from her wooden sign because she knew from her own life's search, that finding the presence of Jesus sometimes means finding him in the spaces between and around and behind where your eyes are pointed.

I think that's where we find the people we love when their lives are over, too: within us and around us and behind us and beside as a constant love, and it fills the spaces where we make our lives. We are shaped by the spaces they occupy wrapped around the spaces we occupy, and there is no separation between them. If you look carefully enough to see, you'll see. Aunt Barb knew how to see. She knew how to ask others to see. And she smiled at the process, filling the spaces around and within those she loved with her unending, unconditional love. That love lives in all who move through those spaces and will stop to look for her there.