The word rippled through campus last fall and sent a collective shudder: Becky Houck has Stage Four bone cancer. I didn’t know what that meant, except that it sounded really bad; there is no Stage Five cancer. Her friends hastened, as the endlessly generous people in this place always do, to offer meals, provide transportation for her treatments, to do what they could to help Becky and her family cope. Maybe it was all that Linnaean classifying in her formation as a biologist, or maybe some more atavistic urge to assert control in the face of the monstrous beast confronting her, but it was Becky herself who put all those cooks, bakers, and chauffeurs on a schedule. The Möbius strip of caring continued with a reception in Becky’s honor one afternoon in the fall. Forget standing room only: the place was so packed that the line of Becky Houck Fans snaked down two corridors in Buckley Center. The place was awash in tears and laughter and stories, stories, stories. That’s what happens when you’ve spent a career in a place and made students soar beyond the ends of their minds, and counseled the fraught, and blazed trails for women faculty who followed, and eased the hearts of disappointed medical school applicants, and danced down the hall with seniors who just got their thick white envelopes, and marveled over alums’ new babies, and written a gazillion heartfelt letters of recommendation, and made a sacrament out of marine biology.

And when you’re calm. Composed, when everyone around you is scurrying to wrestle down their Day Planners, grade heaps of papers, attend endless rounds of meetings, attend to the myriad details that compete for space in our cluttered lives. That same centeredness I have admired so in my interactions with Becky over the years was what awaited each of us when we finally made it through the line at the reception. I think many of us thought we were there to offer Becky strength and courage for the battle. Some of us feared we were saying goodbye. But as my turn drew near, I was astonished to see — literally to see — the strength and courage flowing steadily in the other direction. And like the burning bush, that energy was miraculously undiminished at its source, this petite frail woman in her customary no-nonsense black dress with its great pockets for chalk and keys and cough drops and Kleenex and anything else a professormomwifekindlysoul next to anyone anywhere might need. No goodbyes this afternoon: this was a celebration of a life and career very much in process, thank you very much. This is was a never-ending series of delighted hellos. This was a blessing. These have been sobering months, since then. Many of us talked about shifting our priorities after this bleak reminder of how tiny we are and how unknowable is our time. Becky kept on masterminding the food and transport schedules, and ending all her emails with the simple exhortation to go hug our kids. Take a deep breath. Be. She didn’t tell anyone to go join another committee, stay longer hours in the office, make minute changes in a class to get the evals up a tenth of a point. Her wise advice from that scary, scary place was to live. To engage in the miracles that are present each day “but a beholder want,” as Chesterton says.

Me, I’d always wanted to learn calligraphy, but put off getting serious about it — no time, you know, what with the teaching and researching and wifing and mothering. But now, seeing Becky see everything so clearly, I decided that learning to write beauty was worth an hour each week. The teeny Becky who took up residence on my shoulder at the reception goaded me into it. Live deeply.

And the thing is, I am learning so much about living deeply as I wrestle with nibs and inks and papers and vellum. Rendering letters in a defined space has proven to be a most deliberate, most contemplative act. Beauty erupts that I never could have planned. And often it is lovelier to leave white space than to fill a page with words — to let the still, calm area just be. The visual silence I allow (now there is a telling verb) is often most eloquent, providing a place for individual words to assert their strength and vigor, or their grace and abandon. Much can be unleashed in a consciously constructed quiet. So it is with our lives.

In so many ways, our community’s responding to Becky’s illness was about learning to value the spaces and gentle miracles that do not scream for our attention but serve as infinite reminders of the Sacred. (Notice that sacred and scared are composed of the exact same elements.) Watching this valiant woman yield but not surrender, we see a tenaciously gracious human being teach an entire community without uttering a word.

And the very most best thing is that Becky Houck seemed to whip her cancer and return to campus this spring to teach, this time with words and slides and exams and grades and everything. And this act, this mind-blowing act of defiant grace, lifted the entire community just as thoroughly as her illness had disheartened it. The dark cadence of autumn’s Have you heard about Becky? is now Wow! Have you seen Becky?, spoken with profound awe and affection and hope and inspiration. The collective stoop we had adopted is vanished.

I saw Becky Houck, swampled in her academic regalia, marching at Commencement in May, and the air around her crackled with energy and zest and relief and admiration. Ours is an astonishing community of fiercely dedicated scholar-teachers, and we would joyfully celebrate our students’ commencing even if we weren’t under contract to show up, and it’s a bracing tonic every year to watch parents watch their children, to see the graduates seeking the stands for the dearest faces in their world, to see each find each. But there was something more this time. Becky Houck was there, surrounded by her delighted colleagues, beaming at this latest batch of young wonders she helped launch into the yearning, rainbowsplendored world. It was a blessing.

Karen Eifler, the Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year in Oregon in 2006, teaches education on The Bluff.