Loving and Letting Go

Facing the Stages of Life with Our Faith Communities

On a Sunday morning 20 years ago, I sat with a Friend, Sandy, at her home during our 10 a.m. worship hour at Atlanta (Ga.) Meeting. She was in home hospice care after several years of battling cancer. Conscious of the day and time, halfway through the hour, she said, “Mary Ann, you have to tell them to let me go.” When I sat nodding and crying, she said, “Now! Go!” I drove to meeting and, with tears, asked Friends to let her go. She died a week later.

On a Saturday afternoon in 2023, I sat in our meetingroom with a small group of 18 Friends gathered to help support Lynn, Georgia, and their son, David, for Lynn’s decision to end treatments for multiple health conditions. Lynn loved to joke about everything, and the message on the T-shirt he wore read, “I’m not dead yet.” It conveyed well his struggle to hold on to life, and we knew it was hard for him to say to us, “I’m tired, and I want you to let me go.” Georgia told us that she wanted to honor his wish and needed our help. After 40 years of a loving marriage and family, they knew they faced an everyday challenge in his remaining time. This meeting for Lynn was a time to prepare this group for the work ahead, using lessons we discovered while assisting Sandy and her husband, John, in the last year of her life.

We agreed to work in nine teams of two, each team being on call for a week at a time. While we were all members of Atlanta Meeting, we did not all know each other well and so began with introductions, describing how we knew Lynn and Georgia and the skills we could offer. During the three months we worked together before Lynn’s passing, I was amazed by the generosity of each Friend but also by what we gained in the process of working together. Sharing the care, asking for help from others on the team and in the meeting, strengthened our community and each of us.

I realize that the process of sharing the care also offers lessons in loving and letting go. I wondered what gave Sandy and Lynn the courage and faith to ask us to let them go for their last transition and what helped us meet that request. Could it be that this involvement helped us prepare for our own passing one day? Do we share a spiritual optimism, a belief that way will open even in death? Reflecting on my own experience, I see how being born in the safety of a loving family and community taught me the need for community and our interdependence. Freedom to move away from these early ties when I was ready and find new support helped me develop the courage to let go, trusting I would find my way. My home among Friends teaches me an optimistic spiritual faith.

One Sunday before Lynn’s passing, I reflected on his request while in meeting for worship. I heard a small toddler friend looking out a window at the birds, naming what he saw as his grandmother held him with open arms. I remembered seeing this grandmother and her husband bring each of their three children to meeting, and I watched them grow to be parents with children. The way she held her grandson reminded me of the poet Kahlil Gibran’s advice that our children are not really our children but “of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.” I realized that we love and let go of those we most want to hold onto from the time our children are born. Parenting, teaching, and many kinds of caregiving provide daily challenges in letting go, as we watch children grow through stages of development into adulthood. They become our teachers and help us keep learning to let go when they are ready, and to be there when they fall and need help at any age.

Children are learning these lessons, too, when they are born into a loving family. As toddlers learning to walk, they find the help to take the next steps when they are ready. I remember my own childhood experience needing special shoes for flat feet and weak ankles in order to walk and finally, at age ten, my celebrating the day when I no longer needed special shoes. This example is just one of the many helps that I had in moving beyond the support of family.

At 78, I am learning a spiritual optimism for life’s end and know that when I follow Sandy’s and Lynn’s examples and ask this community to let me go, I will have that support. 

It was important for me to grow up in a faith community. The church activities—and there were many—gave me a second family with strong ties. Lottie, my nursery caregiver and friend for 60 years, taught me that God is love and lived in that Spirit. Her support and my family’s help continued as I moved toward independence, leaving home for college, a career, marriage, and motherhood.

My faith community also taught me that we are interdependent, helping others when needed and receiving help for our needs. This was especially true for our family during the four years between my father’s first heart attack and his death when I was 17, in my senior year of high school. Although I did not see it then, I now realize that both my parents received the support of friends in our Baptist church community through this time, much like what my meeting did for Sandy and Lynn.

The absence of a faith community during my college years and after having a child were powerful reminders of my need for this support. I saw that even as I grew in independence, I needed a home, a place to nourish the Spirit within me, guidance of friends, and help teaching my daughter. After first attending Stony Run Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, during an American Friends Service Committee summer project, I attended Charlotte (N.C.) Meeting with my young daughter for several years. I found a home among Friends in Atlanta (Ga.) Meeting in 1979.

In one of my first visits to Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting, I heard a woman sing the hymn that begins “We are one in the Spirit; we are one in the Lord” during worship. I felt myself affirm the words with my whole body and mind, grounded in faith, and felt held in the arms of God and this safe community. The words to this hymn and others learned in my Baptist church often come to mind in worship as affirmation of a faith that keeps me grounded in work for our meeting and supports my ministry to travel among Friends and my writing.

Recently, I’ve realized that both Sandy’s and Lynn’s requests for us to let them go were also affirmations of faith, acknowledgements that they had been held by our community well enough and long enough that they trusted Spirit to go with them on their journey. Their requests expressed a faith, a spiritual optimism that death was not the end of their journey but a continuation. I was reminded of words attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that we are not just human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience. His writing affirms our belief as Friends that we are born with the Light of God within, a spiritual guide that we can turn to for all the challenges of this human experience. Death, in our faith, is a step on the journey, a continuation of our spiritual journey.

Since 1979 I have received my meeting community’s support for many of life’s challenges: my husband Dave’s death, my own stroke, the celebration of a second marriage, and many other joys and sorrows. At 78, I am learning a spiritual optimism for life’s end and know that when I follow Sandy’s and Lynn’s examples and ask this community to let me go, I will have that support.

In The Book of Hours, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night. . . .

Give me your hand.