Cancer makes me angry. Many diseases destroy lives, but it is cancer that has claimed the lives of many of my family members, friends, and colleagues. It is cancer that has overwhelmed my life and the lives of those I love. My friend and colleague, Sue Campbell, first learned about her breast cancer in the summer 2009 and died in February 2011. The stealthy and ferocious return of my mother's cancer meant that it was discovered only after an ambulance took her to the hospital in October 2012, where she died sixteen days later. I am angry that health‐care cuts have professionals strapped in caring for the dying, particularly in hospitals increasingly populated by the elderly. I am angry that the same hospital where my mother had her mastectomy and follow‐up treatment still sends her letters with stories of hope for cancer survivors. I am angry about cancer that ravages bodies, lives that are ended too soon, and relationships that are no more.

Anger is part of the grieving process, but the intense anger that floods over me gives me pause, so I need to learn how to go on from where I am. I need to learn what dying, death, and grief can reveal about relationships and about love. Relational theorists would insist that dying, death, and grief be placed in relationships that call on us to remember and re‐remember those we love.Footnote ¹ Grief is itself relational. It happens in relationships through which we try to understand what matters to those we love and lose. To know them in ways that respect, honor, and celebrate who they are is to remember and love them when they are dying and then long after. The “long after” also places dying, death, and grief in networks of relationships in which ones that end still have us remember and re‐remember with others in processes that reshape existing relationships and shape new ones.

So these musings have me seek answers to several sorts of questions. What is it to love when the person you love is dying? What is it to love when cancer transforms the person you love in concrete bodily ways? What is it to love when the person you love has died, but the relationship endures? What is it to love in and through remembering and honoring the person you loved? The love I focus on is that which has been shaped in and through personal relationships and shared histories and is now being reshaped in and through activities of remembering. Remembering continues long after the person has died—when pictures or objects call up memories unexpectedly and in sharing memories in relationships in which loved ones lived and loved. These are all activities of coming to know well so as to love well.

What I have found useful in thinking about possibilities for love in contexts of dying, death, and grief are concepts borrowed from two feminists, both of whom employ relational insights to ground their accounts: “loving perception” and “world‐travelling” as described by María Lugones and “relational remembering” as explained by Sue Campbell. So I move back and forth between explaining aspects of Lugones's and Campbell's concepts and applying their insights to loving and remembering two women who have died: my mother and a fellow philosopher and friend, Sue Campbell.Footnote ² In Our Faithfulness to the Past (published posthumously), Campbell provides an account of remembering as deeply relational, embodied, and ongoing. She often applies her account to relationships in political contexts fraught with conflict, oppression, and historical harms. These contexts highlight the significance of relational remembering for knowing well and responsibly. I now apply Campbell's account to relationships filled with pain and with love in the dying, death, and grief processes involving my mother and Sue herself. Through her work that lives on, Sue continues to instruct us on how to remember well so as to know and love well.

In “Playfulness, ‘World’‐Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Lugones takes “loving perception” to be a way out of the “arrogant perception” with which those with privilege perceive those without. Borrowing the concept from Marilyn Frye (Reference Frye1983), Lugones writes:

Lugones's imperfect love for her mother led to her perceiving her mother “arrogantly” as someone she herself did not want to be. Her love was mixed with abuse because she took her mother for granted and failed to value who she was as a person in her own right. What Lugones describes as her relationship with her mother fits my own experience. My mother's world was different from mine and I perceived her arrogantly. Travelling to my mother's world was bound to be difficult in ways quite different from my relationship with Sue.

With Sue the relationship was one that Lugones describes as being at ease; a “world” of knowing and sharing beliefs and values; a loving and being loved that has one at ease with the other; and a mutual respect that incorporates a network of friends and colleagues. Conversations and activities with Sue were open and playful in revealing parts of ourselves and in knowing who and what we loved and what each of us stood for and would defend. I was not at ease in these ways with my mother. Perceiving her arrogantly stood in the way of being able to understand who she really was—as a person with her own ideas, hopes, fears, and goals. No doubt the kind of life I set out to pursue (not hers) intimidated her, but I have had to understand that she did not perceive me arrogantly in the way I did her. Worlds open to me were not open to her. For Lugones, as for Frye, arrogant perception is meant to capture how those with power and privilege are positioned to perceive those without. Loving perception emerges as a moral imperative to come to know others well in order to love well. For Lugones, this is what “world‐travelling” can achieve: “To love my mother was not possible for me while I retained a sense that it was fine for me and others to see her arrogantly. Loving my mother also required that I see with her eyes, that I go into my mother's world, that I see both of us as we are constructed in her world, that I witness her sense of self from within her world” (8).

Like Lugones, I needed to understand “a loving way out of” perceiving my mother arrogantly. Unlike Lugones, “a loving way out of it” was thrust on me when I learned my mother was dying. Travelling to her world meant learning to travel to multiple worlds: that in which she was dying, that in which she was other than how I perceived her when I was growing up, and that in which she is now being remembered. A “loving way out of it” is an ongoing process of coming to know well in order to establish loving relationships. Whereas Lugones's focus is less on the relationships than on the strategies for knowing and loving across differences, I find Campbell's account of relational remembering useful for drawing out the moral implications of remembering well so that we can go on from where we are. For Campbell, remembering well has epistemic and moral implications:

Campbell ties possibilities for knowing to the values of integrity and accuracy—for those who remember and in the relationships that are shaped and reshaped by activities of remembering. Self‐knowledge and self‐constitution have a purpose that becomes evident only in relationships and the remembering that is an inevitable part of them. This continues to be so in my relationship with Sue where aiming for integrity and accuracy is vital in coming to know myself, Sue, her network of family and friends, and her now published book. Integrity and accuracy are required at multiple levels: in the demand Sue put on herself for getting relational remembering right so as to apply it properly to contexts of historical harms; in the imperative that Rocky and I be faithful to Sue and to her work; in the significance of sharing memories with those Sue loved to better understand our shared pasts; in letting go of the goal of arriving at a fixed or secure set of truths about ourselves or others; and in what I now ask of myself in coming to understand how love can emerge through dying, death, and grief.

If acquiring Truth in some objective sense is not the purpose, this frees us to think about memory in the broad relational sense of remembering as a set of activities, emerging in embodied interactions with others, embedded in histories that have wide‐ranging significance for different people, and having ethical import in remembering with integrity and accuracy. As Campbell puts it, “The reconstructive view of memory does not suggest that we can undo or remake facts about the past, or will away the damage of the past by thinking about it differently. It rather stresses that how we remember can change the significance of the past for the future” (Reference Campbell, Koggel and JacobsenCampbell 2014, 148). Changing the “significance of the past for the future” can take many forms. For me, it meant travelling to Sue's and my mother's worlds when their bodies were being destroyed by cancer. Travelling to Sue's world also meant trying to maintain a world in which we were at ease with each other. Travelling to my mother's world meant finding a loving way out of perceiving her arrogantly, with so little time left.

For both Lugones and Campbell, the epistemological emerges from the ethical in that we are called on to know those we perceive arrogantly and to gain insight into appropriate ethical responses to relationships we are in. World‐travelling is necessarily relational, and the same is true for remembering. I ask myself now whether I gained insight into appropriate ethical responses to the dying and then deaths of my mother and Sue. Most of what I learned in the final days of my mother's life did not emerge from sharing memories of our lives and experiences. Though talking and listening played a part, caring for a body transformed by cancer loomed large. Insight emerged in and through being in her world day by day and learning what her body and gestures revealed: the knowing, the fear, the indignities, and the love—all in the face of dying. Insights about loving perception emerged in unlikely ways from travelling to a world of responding to her bodily demands as she did with me when I was a child: feeding her, getting her ready for sleep, making her comfortable, helping her through the shame and indignities of bodily functions that were failing her, and giving her a kiss and telling her I loved her every night. Travelling to her “world” meant that loving her necessitated being able to love and care for her failing and dying body. Loving perception emerged from what was once arrogant perception, but it emerged in and through travelling to this world wrought with pain.

There were others who did this for Sue in the final weeks of her life, and sharing memories with them confirms that they know what I know about love mixed with intense pain. The time I spent with Sue in the final months was more like trying to maintain being at ease with each other by reminiscing about our work, our lives and the lives of children we love, our love for gardening, and our friends: shared norms, activities, histories, relationships, and memories. What emerged, sometimes implicitly, were ideas for honoring who she was as a feminist philosopher by carrying her work forward. This is also a process wrought with love and pain. A shared history of being at ease in her world did not mean I was at ease with the prospect of writing about her work or having her unfinished work published. Relational remembering involves re‐remembering so as to understand the significance of the past for the present and future. Remembering Sue entailed the moral imperative to remember well and responsibly so as to honor who she was as a philosopher and friend: “if the importance of integrity in memory is partly grounded in how we contribute to other people's grasp of the past, integrity is an epistemic virtue that serves the complex notion of memory accuracy” (Reference Campbell, Koggel and JacobsenCampbell 2014, 45). There is no point at which we can determine once and for all whether remembering Sue or contributing to “other people's grasp” of her work is completed and done accurately. The process is ongoing, as re‐remembering continues to “shape the significance of a shared past.”

Sharing memories is also ongoing in the case of my mother, a relationship that needed to be reshaped so that I would emerge with less anger and more love. I still needed to travel to the world in which she lived, loved, and was a person in her own right. My mother was of a different generation, a generation that did not seem to question facts about how her life would unfold: she would marry, she would leave her family and follow my father to a new country, she would have children as a good Catholic woman who let God determine how many, and she would devote her life to my father and her children. Her final wish was stated on the day before she died, when she asked my sister and me to stay with her that night: “I want all my children here.” Travelling to her world with her final wish in mind forced me to recognize the significance of our past, one in which her identity, responsibilities, and opportunities were shaped by being a mother to so many children. The significance of our shared past had me understand that she helped open up worlds to her children that were not open to her.

The final night my sister and I cared for our mother through the indignities and the pain and worked together to respect her final wish of having “all my children here.” The night following her death we engaged in an intense and powerful sharing of memories of our mother and the dynamics of family relationships. World‐travelling also plays a role in coming to know how another's grief emerges from relationships, histories, and memories different from mine. Dying, death, and grief shaped a new relationship with my sister. They continue to shape and reshape relationships with partners, siblings, families, friends, and even the relationships with my mother and with Sue that persist in and through sharing memories of them with others. I still travel to my mother's world and to Sue's world.

The account of feminist love I defend is one that remains open to engaging in world‐travelling, becoming at ease in worlds that separate, and remembering in morally responsive and responsible ways. Feminist love highlights the importance of coming to know ourselves and others in ways that are faithful to lives lived and lost. Using insights from Lugones and Campbell and drawing out the relational features of loving perception in and through remembering reveals only a small part of what it is to love and honor my mother and Sue—in the particularities of their lives and relationships.

These musings suggest that general theories that attempt to capture or fix the meanings of dying, death, and grief cannot be had. Relationships continue to be shaped and reshaped through a re‐remembering that calls on us to be attentive to knowing well and responsibly. Lugones's call for loving perception can alter grief overwhelmed by anger to grief that celebrates love in relationships that endure. Joining this with Campbell's call to remember with accuracy and integrity the significance of a shared past makes a “loving way out of it” an ongoing process as we come to know how best to go on from where we are. These musings are themselves part of that ongoing process.