Love is a Great Room with a Lot of Doors: grief and love in Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

I read Wendell Berry’s wonderful book, Hannah Coulter, in the past month, and it was a beautifully moving book. I deeply enjoyed so much about it, that I find it difficult to summarize the ways Berry opens the read into human relationships, the significance of grief, generational change, the texture of love, and so much more. If you’ve never read a work of fiction by Berry I highly recommend this book or another in the Port William novels, Jayber Crow.

I don’t often write extended quotations from books in my journal, but I did write this from Hannah Coulter there just a few weeks ago. It captured my own heart in walking with people through grief and facing my own griefs over the last several years. Rereading these words the other day, I thought it might speak to others as much as it did to me. So here you go…

I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for awhile. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2004), 51.