To Live With No Regrets

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After falling in love with Linda, he just as enthusiastically uprooted himself to start a new life with her in a new city. Though she was much younger than Jack, she too had endured some of life's hardest lessons. I met Linda 17 years ago when she was my son Sam's kindergarten teacher. In 1995 her husband died suddenly of cardiac arrest, a shock for her and for their only child, Kirsten, then 16. A year later, Kirsten and a close friend were killed in a car accident. Linda, a passenger in the car, was the only one to survive, albeit after a long and difficult recovery.

Some people are darkened by unbearable grief; others become incandescent. Linda is one of the latter: her presence, her humor, her honesty, her joy and sadness all pouring through a shattered heart. But how?

I found clues in She Would Draw Flowers, a book of Kirsten's poems and drawings that Linda published after her daughter's death. Even apart from the tragic circumstances, Kirsten's poems are truly beautiful testaments of love -- for her friends, for her lost father, and, most poignantly, for her own vital young self. It's a marvel to follow her thoughts as she confronts the trauma of her father's sudden death and transforms it into a deepening joy for life and its possibilities. Kirsten was a gifted artist. In one of the final poems in the collection, she concludes, "So, I carry you in me, not as the fading memory of a father, but rather as a growing, glowing child, until we become one, and I can let you go."

The words that helped Kirsten also helped Linda endure what is often said to be the most crushing bereavement, losing a child. "As a mother, each day facing this unimaginable loss, I question how I might remain connected to my beloved daughter while leaving her free to journey on," she writes in the introduction. Kirsten's drawings and poems were among the few tangible ties left to her daughter, she adds. "But the profound path of her inner transformation shared in these poems has also served as my guide for letting her go."

After the accident, Linda says, she realized that everything in her life was now open. And so, when she and Jack married, they shared openly their process of living and relationship with those who were interested. "It became something so simple and so rare," she says, "something we are all so hungry for: conscious community and conversation. Aren't we all growing and struggling in our relationships?"

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