The first time we talked to Gloria back in 2012, the sky had already made up its mind to fall apart. And, in our own way, I suppose we had too.

I remember how far out we’d parked, at the edge of the mall lot, feeling a little like fugitives from our own lives. We sat there for a few minutes, the engine running, rehearsing what we wanted to say.

All afternoon, a spring storm had been gathering itself. Dark clouds stacking themselves higher and higher, like they too were summoning their courage to finally break. Looking back, it was almost too perfect: the world mirroring us back to ourselves in a way that was impossible to ignore.

The rain arrived all at once, a sudden, muscular downpour. It hammered the windshield in slanted sheets, the wipers smearing everything into a blur. We sat together, suspended outside of time, sealed off from the rest of the world in that little Honda Civic – listening to the phone ring.

We’d prearranged a time to call, so we knew she would answer. I can still feel the texture of that moment – the way the silence before the confession pressed against us, stretched tight like the skin of a drum.

We didn’t really know Gloria then. Charlene had once been connected to her through marriage – entering the family at almost the same time that Gloria was finding her way out of it, because she had come out. Their lives only brushed against each other in that brief, improbable crossing: one woman arriving as the other stepped off into the great, unlit unknown.

But there we were on that day, standing at the very threshold she’d crossed more than 20 years before us, carrying our own version of the same truth. Married women, bound to families and routines, our lives built around a story that was no longer the whole story. An impossible, unexpected truth between us.

For the next two hours, she was the lantern in our dark. She didn’t preach, and she didn’t promise. She told us what this road was going to ask of us. She laid the truth before us – the whole complicated and luminous thing: you are not the first to feel this and you won’t be the last to survive it. And survival, she reminded us, begins with the way you care for your own heart. We have not forgotten that.

One of the last times we saw her, we sat on the porch before heading out to Collingwood Pride, talking about the state of the world and how politics is dividing families. She spoke with that calm wisdom of hers — reminding us that love is a long road, and that sometimes the people walking it with you stumble in their fear.

“That’s just it,” she said, looking out over her gardens. “How do you love…”

It wasn’t really a question. It was a truth she was laying down between us. She meant it in a broader, esoteric sense. What she was suggesting we consider was how to keep our hearts open while standing face to face with the hurt people hand us.

She was naming the hardest work any of us do: to keep loving in the very place where we have been hurt. To answer injury without becoming it. To stand in the ruins and refuse to surrender our own humanity.

She believed in the answer she lived. Loving them through. Loving them past the places where understanding falters. Loving them in a way that makes room for truth without closing the door on hope. I remember looking at her in that moment, struck by the sheer bigness of her spirit. She stockpiled gratitude. And she gave love in every circumstance – because she understood it is the one offering we never look back on with regret.

For one shining sliver of time, Gloria was our wayfinder. A witness to our truth. She arrived and never left us, showing us – through the simple courage of her own living – that the life we once feared might break us could, in fact, open into something so startlingly beautiful we could hardly bear its brightness.

In her presence, we felt the strength of all those who have walked this road before us, and in her voice we heard the echo of a promise she never had to speak aloud: This is survivable. And more than that – there is a whole, astonishing life waiting for you to create it.

When we learned she’d died suddenly of heart failure on Thursday, the world just stopped. Her heart burst. Of course, she’d be the one whose heart couldn’t contain itself for another second. I hope, in the moment, it felt like nothing more than a standing ovation from the inside of her own ribs.  

She has stepped beyond this earthly place, yet she is nowhere near gone. She is widening now, unfurling into something vaster than we ever knew. To die, after all, is only to be remade in those who loved you – gone from our sight but alive in us still, in all the ways she taught us to love this world. And ourselves.