Bears and Bereavement

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain...

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

The first bear appeared on Mother's Day last spring. I was circling Jenny Lake beneath the Tetons, carrying a grief I could neither resolve nor avoid. It was a season marked by uncertainty, loss, and remorse. Walking through nature is my way of moving through questions that have no answers. Eco-chaplaincy is teaching me how to take that personal practice and use it to accompany others through their grief.

There is a place along the trail where the trees part and the Grand Teton draws your attention upward. When I lowered my gaze, a grizzly was crossing the trail ahead of me—close enough to make me reach for the bear spray on my hip. I held my breath and watched. The bear moved without urgency, entirely unconcerned with my presence. I felt the awesome and visceral fear that being in proximity to a bear evokes. Then it wandered uphill through the sagebrush.

By the time I returned to my car, the vast, blue Wyoming sky had turned dark. Wind and a wall of rain swept across the lake. Hail pelted my car. The landscape I had walked through only hours earlier had transformed completely. The Tetons were enshrouded by clouds.

A year later, on Mother's Day, I hiked Bear Mountain in New York with my daughter. The name did not escape me. Just twelve months earlier, I had been circling Jenny Lake wondering whether I would spend the rest of my Mother's Days alone in sorrow. Now I found myself on a mountain that carried the same symbol that had followed me through that difficult year.

One week later, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of my father's death, another bear appeared. I was circling Reservoir #6 in my hometown of West Hartford. As a teenager, I trained there, dreamed there, grieved there, and returned whenever I was home. My father had walked those same trails decades earlier while battling the leukemia that eventually took his life.

The fear that had defined the previous year had softened. Hope had begun to return, though uncertainty remained, now tempered by hard-won patience and wisdom. As I walked along the shoreline, I saw a black bear bobbing in the water, cooling off on an unseasonably hot spring afternoon. He ambled out of the reservoir a short distance ahead of me on the trail, and I followed slowly behind him, my fascination outweighing my fear.

The encounter felt no less improbable than the grizzly had the year before. Two bears. Two bodies of water. Two anniversaries. Two moments when I was trying to orient myself within a life that no longer looked the way I had hoped or imagined.

The third bear appeared during a week-long immersion in death and dying as part of my chaplaincy studies. We had been asked to write a letter to our loved ones to be opened after our death. It was a beautiful June day, and the classroom felt too small to hold the weight of the question. I carried my notebook to a picnic table near the trees along the Park River—the same river Mark Twain once looked out upon while writing Huckleberry Finn, the same river the Podunk and Wangunk once fished.

As I sat there, I found myself thinking about grief and the things people carry after loss. We carry people. We carry memories. We carry unfinished conversations. We carry hopes for futures that never arrived. We carry questions that have no answers. We carry these invisible things within our hearts: regret, guilt, fear, anger, unanswered questions, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all. We carry these gifts that remind us of our capacity to love. Halfway through my letter, I looked up and saw a black bear in the woods. It paused beside a tree, scratched its back, and continued on its way. Construction workers were jackhammering a block away. A dog barked at the postman. Car horns beeped. The bear seemed completely unconcerned by all of it. My letter was forgotten as I watched -mesmerized-until it disappeared.

For a long time, I thought the significance of these encounters lay in what the bears symbolized. I wondered too, why my initial inclination was to ask --what does it mean? Eventually, I became less interested in interpretation and more interested in what happened when I noticed them.

Each encounter provided a sacred pause. 

My grief loosened its grip. My breath came easier as my attention shifted away from heartache and toward what was actually present. The bears did not answer my questions. They did not resolve my grief. They didn't not judge my mistakes nor were they concerned with my religious piety or practice. Sometimes symbols and stories give us a way into conversations we struggle to approach directly. We begin by talking about a bear and discover we are talking about grief. We begin by talking about a landscape and discover we are talking about belonging. That realization explains why eco-chaplaincy resonates so deeply with me.

Human beings have been seeking meaning this way for thousands of years. Long before we built seminaries, hospitals, and universities, we gathered around fires or cups of tea and tried to understand what frightened us, sustained us, and broke our hearts. We buried our dead. We watched the movement of the sun and stars. We built places like Newgrange and aligned them with the winter solstice. We left offerings beside rivers and springs. We told stories about bears.

The details differ across cultures and centuries, but the questions remain remarkably consistent. How do we live with uncertainty? How do we continue after loss? How do we find our bearings when the map we were carrying becomes obsolete? I do not know what bears imagine. They just keep living. Noticing patterns is part of what human beings do. We connect stories, places, anniversaries, and encounters in an effort to understand our lives. The bears that crossed my path became part of that process. Yet they were not only symbols. They were also real animals moving through changing landscapes.

The black bear wandering through my Hartford neighborhood was following the Park River corridor through a changing ecosystem. Connecticut's bear population has expanded dramatically during my lifetime, and bears are now found in every municipality in the state. The same encounter that invited reflection on my own life also raised questions about habitat loss, development, climate change, and coexistence. Eco-chaplaincy asks us to hold both realities at once: the personal story we tell about an encounter and the ecological reality in which that encounter occurs. Perhaps we have always been seeking orientation rather than certainty.

Years ago, while earning an M.Phil. in Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin, I studied the root causes of conflict and the pathways toward reconcilliation. I learned that most conflicts are not really about the thing being argued. Beneath positions lie stories. Beneath stories lie fears. Beneath fears lie needs for belonging, dignity, safety, recognition, and love. Chaplaincy asks many of the same questions, but on a more personal scale. What is this person carrying? What loss remains unnamed? What story are they telling themselves about what has happened? Before people can make meaning from suffering, they need someone willing to witness it. Chaplaincy requires learning to listen beneath the surface of a person's story, noticing the fears, losses, and longings within it. Eco-chaplaincy is not about finding answers in nature. It is about cultivating the pause that allows discernment to emerge. The work is not to provide answers or impose meaning. It is to listen carefully enough to distill what lies beneath the story being told.

My path to eco-chaplaincy began long before graduate school. It began beside reservoirs and rivers, within forests, and on top of mountains. It began through loss, wonder, noticing, and accompaniment. Eco-chaplaincy simply gave language to something I had been practicing for much of my life: the privilege of witness.

An Caol Áit: A Thin Place

 

There is a phrase in Irish—An Caol Áit. A thin place. A threshold. A moment when the boundary between what was and what is becomes less certain, when time does not move cleanly forward, but gathers.

There are moments when time thins, when everything is closer than it should be. This past week or so has felt like that. My daughter’s nineteenth birthday. My father’s ninety-eighth. The fourth anniversary of Colin’s death. The birthday of someone I once loved. Easter. Good Friday. Ramadan. A rejection from Yale Divinity School. A job rejection. All of it sitting inside the same narrow span of days. Different versions of my life, different versions of myself, drawing closer together. Not in sequence. All at once.

It is hard not to feel the compression of it, the sense that what was is not past, that what is here now is not separate from it. There are traditions that understand time this way. In Tír na nÓg, time does not move as we expect it to. A short stay becomes a lifetime. A lifetime becomes something else entirely. In moments like this, that feels less like myth than recognition.

There are periods of time that are not lived in the usual way. The day continues—you show up, you speak, you move through what is required—but none of it is where your attention is held. You are waiting for a moment that will determine what comes next. Everything else becomes background. Time reduces itself to a single point of focus.

And still, life insists on itself. There are decisions to make. Logistics to manage. Things that cannot wait, even when everything inside you is waiting. You keep moving. Not because you are especially strong, but because there is no other option.

There are moments that divide a life. Who you were before them and who you are after are not the same. The day we were told Colin would be taken off life support was one of those moments. It was more than loss. It was hope floating away like a lost balloon. It was the collapse of a way of understanding. What you lose in a moment like that is the idea that there is still time to fix things—that whatever was unfinished might still be repaired, that there will be another conversation. That possibility disappears, not gradually, but all at once.

When someone is dying, time goes very fast. It collapses and rushes forward. When you are estranged from someone, time goes very, very slow. Each day stretches. The absence repeats itself. Nothing replaces it. You wait in the doldrums. I understand now how the sailors felt.

We measure time in moments—the ones that hold, the ones that rupture, the ones we wish we could undo. But there are other ways we are taught to measure time—in minutes, in counts, in units meant to keep something going. We measure to survive.

Counting has always been a way through uncertainty. In CPR, you count to keep someone alive—compressions, breaths, rhythm, over and over, holding the sequence because the sequence is what stands between life and loss. In the mountains, you count the seconds between lightning and thunder, tracking the distance of the storm, measuring risk in real time. Each number carries consequence. Each one tells you whether to move, to wait, to take cover.

Counting becomes a form of control when control is otherwise gone. A way of staying inside something long enough to get through it.

I have found myself measuring time in another way. In the last two months, as these anniversaries approached, I began using a daimoku app that counts my chants. It tracks how many times I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, how many minutes, how many hours. At first, it felt like a way to make the effort visible, to give form to something that otherwise disappears as soon as it is spoken. I started setting numbers for myself—just another thousand, then another, then another. The counting becomes its own rhythm, something to move toward, something to complete.

Each repetition is meant to matter. Each one, in some way, to repair. I find myself attaching meaning to the numbers, imagining that I am not just moving through time, but altering it—healing karma, healing what has already happened, what is happening now, what might otherwise carry forward. Most often, I am imagining her—my daughter—her heart—trying to reach something in her that I cannot reach directly, trying to lighten what she is carrying so that it does not break her spirit in the way that mine has been.

And yet, like the other ways I have measured time, it does not resolve what I am inside of. The numbers accumulate. The effort is real. But what I am waiting for does not arrive on command. What is the magic number? How many chants are enough? Enough for accountability? For forgiveness? For reconciliation? For recalibration?

The moments that feel most final—the ones that seem to seal something shut—are not actually contained in the way they feel. They are experienced that way, but they exist inside something larger than what can be seen from within them. We give those moments enormous weight, as if they define everything that came before and everything that will come after. That may not be true. It may only be how they feel while we are inside them. Feeling is not the same as finality.

There is a teaching by Pema Chödrön that this moment can be a teacher—that when we reach what feels like the edge, the instruction is not to harden or escape, but to stay.  To soften into what is here, even when it is not what we would have chosen. Not as resignation, but as a way of remaining in contact with what is still alive within it.

Staying is not theoretical. I have done it before.

In labor, the contractions came closer together. Five minutes. Three. Two. Time reduced to intervals—something to brace against, something to get through. And underneath it, another rhythm—the steady sound of her heartbeat, one hundred and forty beats per minute. Life continued, whether anything was progressing or not.

The contractions intensified, but nothing opened.

I remember how the rhythm on her heart monitor shifted when she went into distress. 140 beats per minute turned into 160. Someone said- that baby needs to come out- now. The mood of the room shifted instantly—swiftly, silently. I didn’t fully understand why. I could feel it, though—the way voices lowered, the way movements became more precise, the way attention narrowed.

Within the hour, she was born. It was very quiet. No crying. Not from her. Not from me. They had already seen the meconium. They took her immediately to check her lungs. I could hear voices, but not the words.

I was still on the table, numb from the waist down, legs akimbo. No one at my shoulder. No one telling me what was happening. I remember asking, quietly, is everything okay? No one answered directly.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours. I was exhausted, slightly outside of myself. Listening. Fading.

That was the beginning.

I have been here before.

At the beginning of her life, I was alone. In every way that matters—in my body, carrying it, enduring it, bringing her into the world.

And at the moment her father died, I was alone again. Not in the same room, not in the same way—but in the knowing of it, in the way it would land, in the way it would change everything that came after.

These are the two fixed points of her life as I have lived it—her birth and his death, just six days apart on the calendar.

I was there for both.

And now I am not there at all.

Time does not always move in one direction. It stretches. It stalls. It folds back on itself. There are stretches of life that feel full and intact, and others that feel flattened—not because nothing happened, but because something essential was missing.

What gives a life its shape is not only what happens, but who is there to witness it. And even when you are not alone, you notice the empty chair.

In my daughter’s first year of life, I witnessed everything alone—her first smile, her first word, her first steps, the small things that are not small at all. In this past year, I have not been there to witness her life. Whatever is happening to her now—her formation, her milestones, her becoming—I am not there to see it. I am not there to celebrate her. I wonder if she feels the loss as much as I do.

Estrangement removes the witness, but it does not erase the space where that witness would have been. An empty chair is still an empty chair. 

There is another way time distorts—when it is measured on someone else’s clock. Waiting for someone to come back, to understand, to decide that you are worth showing up for. Time passes, but it does not move forward. It stalls.

I have spent years inside that kind of time. Waiting for people to show up, to take responsibility, to meet me where I was already standing. Waiting for something to resolve that never did.

Sometimes, it does not resolve.

People do not return. Conversations do not happen. And then people die. And it is over. The clock stops.

Time does not fix what people refuse to repair.

Time moves in one direction, whether it is moving too fast or too slow. And so what remains is not control, but attention. What you saw. What you missed. What you were there for. What you were not. What you think you remember. What you wish you could forget.

Today would have been my father’s ninety-eighth birthday. Friday was my daughter’s nineteenth. Thursday is the day that Colin died.

That is one way to measure time.

But it is not the only one.

There is also what is still possible to witness, what is still possible to return to, what is not yet fixed. Even now, time is not only closing. It is also opening—quietly, without announcement, in moments that do not yet know what they will become.

At the reservoir early this morning, as I finished chanting, a Great Blue Heron was perched in the tree across the water, twenty or thirty feet up. It stood there for a time, surveying the surface of the water. Then without any urgency, it lifted, crossed low over the water and landed at the edge. Nothing about it felt rushed. Or stalled. I watched it longer than I meant to.

Attention is not only how we mark what has been lost. It is how we recognize what has not yet disappeared. And what is yet to come.