I recently attended two memorials, back to back. One was for a man, a vibrant engaged man, at the peak of his work life, a middle-aged father of two, taken out violently and unexpectedly. The other was for an older woman, who had been gentling out of her life for the last several years and was ready for her departure. The man, called Davan, I had met only once but instantly liked and appreciated. Passionate and present, his sudden departure from a head-on collision was shocking. No one was prepared, including, I suspect, himself. The woman I had known for years. Her end was anticipated and prepared for and had a certain rightness to it.

But all endings, even those with a grounding inevitability, leave us feeling tipsy. We steady ourselves by gazing a little longer into the eyes of those around us, those who, like us, are still embodied, two-footed or four-footed, on the planet.

The older woman was Cora Brooks, and Vermont Woman has prepared a tribute to this wise, warm, and, yes, sometimes difficult woman. I knew Cora—better than some, not as well as many others. I first saw her in the late ’70s, when I, a high school dropout, had somehow found my way to Goddard College. I remember seeing, in the distance, in the dimness of the manor, a short, slight woman with long black hair, standing and talking with animated assurity to someone. I didn’t speak to her; I was too in awe. I was just beginning to take my writing seriously, but she was published. I was an activist and had gone on many marches, but she had gotten arrested. Decades later, Cora moved to Montpelier and turned to visual art, and we encountered each other in an artists’ group. Still slight but now with white hair, cut short, she took an interest in me, commenting on my artwork and chatting me up, and I became, I realize now, one of the many people she liked to collect and gather round her.

As she gradually became a closer friend, I thought, perhaps, she could become my late-in-life much-desired writing mentor, the mentor I never had. But she quickly let me know that her mentoring days were over. She would no longer comment but she was glad to listen and share, and so we read aloud our words to each other and collaborated on a couple of painting and writing projects.

We were very different writers. Cora’s words were spare and deft. She wrote standing up, wielding a pencil. My hand is too slow, my writing too crabbed, to capture the flood of my feelings and thoughts, so I race on a computer keyboard, tapping out word forests, sometimes intricate and weird, which I later invade with chain saws and hatchets. I really didn’t know her process but sensed her lyric flowed with more control. Her words often had that oh-yes rightness, light as goose down, profound as a mountain.

Like many others, I passed quite a few hours at her kitchen table, talking politics, art, people.

Cora had a general animus toward and suspicion of men that I didn’t share, and she had a set of well-polished tales of grievances and grudges that she repeatedly wound up and set in motion. But she was also a wonderful storyteller with a sharp and original mind. Her unusual, lyric observations turned our conversations into little poems. I’d vow to capture some of those words after my night walk home but never managed. The words all vanished, as evanescent as birdsong.

I did visit in the warm season and while it was still light, but for some reason it’s the evening winter visits I remember. As I got ready to leave, she worried would I be all right on my walk alone, on dim-lit icy sidewalks, a bit tipsy from her hospitality (though half a foot shorter than me and reed thin, she held her weed and wine far better than me). And so she’d offer something to guide me: a red whistle to blow and fend off potential attackers, a red flashlight to light my way. I never felt I really needed these things, but I always accepted them, as way to acknowledge and honor her care, and strode home, under Cora’s extended protection, my head dancing from our conversation.

I got to know Cora while she was on a slow retreat. A fighter all her life she seemed content to cede territory (though she had one fight left in her, a scuffle with city hall over her Cummings Street property). More than once, she told me she already had her epitaph in mind, an inscription on an imaginary headstone: “She did enough.” Or maybe, “She did too much.” On her front door was a “do not resuscitate” sign. She made it clear to me that she wanted no effort made to keep her alive. She was ready.

Once, during an evening winter visit, she talked to me about how easy it would be to die in those subzero temperatures. You had only to walk outdoors, naked, curl in the snow in your own backyard, and wait. Yes! I agreed, and we quietly sat and thought together about that winter black, just behind her house. I marveled at how thin the veil is. It’s the shiver I get when I cross one of Montpelier’s bridges during the darkening season, before the water has locked up, and bend to look at the cold hurrying river and think how easy it would be to tip over—or wander over the center line into an oncoming truck. But for her, I think, that blackness, the availability of death, was becoming a comfort, a ready exit that she was meditating on, in a calm in-gathering way, and growing accustomed to.

When I learned that Cora intended to starve herself to death, I wasn’t as shocked as some, perhaps. I was sad she was going. She had slipped a bit from two strokes, but she was still observant and present, perhaps even more present, and she still had a place in the community as a beacon. But it also felt right: I knew her grip on this world was very loose. She seemed weary to me. She told me she had to remind herself to eat, scheduling it in with her daily activities: braid hair, wash dish, eat apple. It’s fitting that Cora, born in spring, would choose the equinox to begin her descent, letting go as the light lets go.

This season is naturally a time of loss and reckoning. This, more than winter, is the season of death, the sloughing of leaves and light. And when it’s all gone and you’re in the dark well of the longest night, when you have bottomed out, when your soles touch sea bottom, it turns. We roll in the darkness, turning in what feels like a grave but is really a womb, and realize, while still in the deep, that we’ve been preparing, all the while, for birth. Once again. Winter, the coldest season, begins with the return of the light. A frail cupped flame, gradually steadying over winter’s reign.

On November 8, I gathered with a group at the Vermont State House in support of the Robert Mueller investigation, the day after President Trump fired US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and appointed Matthew Whittaker, who has been openly critical of the investigation, as acting attorney general. We stood in protest, many of us holding lit candles, a symbolic light against the darkness. One of the organizers wrapped up the rally with a quote.

I unfortunately can’t remember who was quoted or even the exact quote, but here’s what I heard: we need to honor our gifts, our passions, whatever they are—words, song, painting, organizing—and we need to honor one another. We need to hold each other close—because we’re all living in a house on fire.

I needed to hear that it was not just OK but necessary for me to keep writing, to keep a cupped flame against the darkness, against the death of so much, of democracy, of the light, of an increasingly ravaged planet, and to imbue my inevitable death, our inevitable deaths, with meaning by finding meaning while alive.

So Cora is gone. And Davan is gone. So many others have gone before us; so many more will go before we take our turn. The earth tilts, the seasons turn. Ceres returns to her pedestal on the capitol dome, renewed and beautiful, ready to shed again her benevolent mothering gaze on our green state. And under that other dome in Washington, DC, things shift, just a bit, perhaps. Let us hope. Maybe, just maybe, we are shedding our way to light.

Kate Mueller is the Editor of Vermont Woman newspaper.