Bringing hope

There were days Linda Lawrence Hunt could barely get out of bed; her grief was so deep. Yet late last month, she scooped into her arms a chuckling, blue-eyed baby boy — the embodiment of all of the hopes that remained after the terrible loss of her daughter eight years ago. That daughter, Krista Hunt Ausland, was 25 when she died. Last month Hunt and her husband welcomed home Krista’s former husband, Aaron Ausland, his new wife Gabriela, and this exuberant 1-year-old boy, their son, Thiago.

“When you see a child like this, how can you not think life is a great gift?” Hunt asked. A woman with a gentle voice and smiling eyes, she cuddled the boy in her arms.

Ausland flew with his family to Spokane two weeks ago to speak at a fundraising breakfast for the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, which he helped Krista’s parents start after her death. It helps support young people who share Krista’s value of service throughout the world.

Krista died in Bolivia in 1998 when she and Ausland were serving indigenous families there. She worked on health, nutrition and literacy and helped start libraries. They were riding in a bus through the mountains when it careened off the road and tumbled down a 1,000-foot ravine. Krista died there on the mountainside.

One recent afternoon, Linda Hunt and Aaron Ausland sat down in front of the fireplace in a guesthouse in Spokane. As the sun shone through the gold maple leaves outside the front window, they described how, individually and as a unique extended family, they moved through profound grief to find meaning and hope.

One of the results has been the work of their foundation, which just this fall received a $139,000 grant from the Murdoch Foundation to hire a new staff member and open a satellite office in Seattle. The organization helps to support the work of young Christian adults of the Northwest who serve all over the globe in agencies such as the Peace Corps, Presbyterian Young Adult Mission and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. They’ve helped 120 young people, whom they call Krista Colleagues.

In the past eight years, both their lives were shattered; both were carefully mended.

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The story starts with Ausland, a young Plains, Mont., man who lost his mother to breast cancer and came to call Linda his “heart mother.”

After his young wife’s death, Ausland flew with Linda and Jim Hunt to Bolivia, where he showed them the adobe home he shared with Krista, introduced them to her friends, and traveled back to the mountain where she died.

In those early days, Ausland felt as though he faced a blank empty space ahead. His senses were dulled. He didn’t respond to colors, flavors, sights or sounds. The tragedy, then as now, struck him as random and incomprehensible.

“When people tell you there’s a purpose for everything, I want to barf,” he says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t think so.’ “

That year he traveled to every place he’d visited with Krista. He stayed with the Hunts and grieved with them around the pond in their backyard.

“That is your work,” he says. “That is what you are reduced to doing. When no other work matters anymore, your work is to figure out how to get through the tragedy and emerge somehow with an identity and with purpose and with a life and a hope.”

With neither a job, a stack of bills, nor children to distract him, he had the luxury to be mindful of his passage through grief.

“When (your hopes) all have been emptied out,” Ausland says, “or all the ones you thought mattered, you have to figure out: What hopes remain?”

During that year, he met a striking young Bolivian translator named Gabriela Moreno, and he returned to work on a microfinance project in the country. As the first anniversary of Krista’s death approached, he made plans. He designed a marker, a cross with a black dove for Krista, black for death, a dove for spirit and peace.

He and a friend fasted for seven days between the date of her death and the date of her funeral, which had fallen on their third wedding anniversary. He climbed back to the site where Krista died to place the marker. And around that time he made another deliberate choice.

He danced the flamenco with Gabriela.

“It’s a very vibrant, virile dance. It’s macho and arrogant and proud and flashy and sensual, and it’s over the top,” Ausland says. “It’s not something you do in the middle of mourning. That was the whole point.”

Eventually he came to understand that although he’d never find a purpose in Krista’s death, he could create meaning from it.

In 2002 he and Gabriela were married. He pursued a master’s degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, completing a thesis that designed a model for reducing corruption through good local governance in Peru. He serves on the Krista Foundation Board and serves as editor of its yearly journal, The Global Citizen. He now travels around the globe with World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization, and lives with Gabriela and Thiago in Duarte, Calif.

Ausland came to realize he’s not alone in experiencing catastrophic loss. He read Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and he came to realize that some people are able to create meaning even from tragedy.

“That’s what the Krista Foundation is about,” he says.

Now sorrow shapes his relationship with Gabriela and Thiago.

“If I can be mindful of her mortality and my mortality and our son’s mortality … then let’s not waste any time. We don’t argue. We don’t get petty. Why go there?”

Instead, he says, he chooses “to love deeply and richly.”

On his ankle, Ausland still wears the tattoo of a small, black, rising dove.

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Sitting across from a round stained-glass window, the colorful logo of the Krista Foundation, Linda Lawrence Hunt tells another story. Hers centers around the huge, almost unnamable loss of a child.

She sat on her front porch the day after Krista’s death.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to try to understand it. It makes no human sense that a woman of Krista’s spirit and heart and love that wants to give to the world … to see her killed. There’s no way to understand it.”

She turned to her Christian faith.

“My hope is that we could be open to God’s grace, God’s mercy, knowing that God stays alongside us whatever life brings.”

In the first year she was overwhelmed by acute grief. Another couple of years passed.

“I’d read this stuff that talks about grief lifting, and I’d wonder, ‘Does it actually do that?’ “

Life brought the Krista Foundation, retirement as an English professor at Whitworth College, where her husband still teaches, and a book to write, “Bold Spirit” (Anchor Books).

Now Hunt is writing another book. This one has a working title of “A Great Remembering: Healing Gestures After the Loss of a Child.”

She has interviewed other grieving parents and heard echoes of her own experience.

“There’s acute grief for the first one or two years,” she says. “That ebbs for most people. (But for parents) sorrow will go with you to your grave.”

“It’s just so huge,” she says. “But enormous loss is related to enormous love.”

She found it’s possible to locate the vast reservoir of love that underlies a parent’s deep grief.

“If you can tap that, you actually have a rich resource of energy… because it is love,” she says. “And love is a powerful source.”

She and her husband built this guesthouse on their property. They use it for gatherings of Krista Colleagues. They named it “The Hearth.”

Outside stands a red door from the barn they tore down to build this place. It carries Krista’s three white handprints, the souvenirs of a childhood prank. Upstairs sits a wooden chair, carved with the black dove-cross design from Aaron’s death-site marker. On a wall hangs a photo of the Bolivian library now named for their daughter.

Here the Hunts help young people nurture the values that motivated Krista.

“Our goal is a lifelong ethic of service, whatever profession,” Hunt says. “We hope (Krista Colleagues) go into the corporate world, we hope they go into politics, we hope they go into medicine, law, (that) whatever they choose to do, that they have a spirit of care for the world.”

She and her husband continue to embrace Ausland and his new family.

“When I tell people in other countries about how our families have managed this, they are just dumbfounded,” Ausland tells her. “Folks in Bolivia really expect you and Jim to hate Gabriela and that feeling would be mutual.”

Even Americans are shocked by the closeness of their families, Hunt says. While Ausland studied at Harvard, Gabriela worked as a nanny for the Hunt’s daughter and her husband – Susan Hunt Stevens and Peter Stevens – who live in Boston.

But she asks, “How could you not love Gabriela?” She finds in the young Bolivian woman qualities Krista held, too: an appealing empathy, a love of people and a joy in life.

“Gabriela’s generosity of spirit has allowed us to be a whole family,” she says.

It’s time to run to the grocery store before dinner, but little Thiago wakes from his nap and lands in the lap of his “heart grandmother.” He chortles; she coos.

Hunt explains he does not release her from the sorrow of missing the grandchildren Krista might have borne.

But that emotion recedes in the presence of Thiago’s joyful grin.

“I can’t imagine the world,” says Hunt, “without this little boy.”