When you fly into Sioux City, Iowa, in the winter, farm roads slice into the snowy countryside. From the air, the slices look like dark brush strokes on a white canvas. When my husband’s sister Mary was in her 40s, she took up painting, and the strokes in some of her paintings look like those snowy farm roads, as seen from above, from a different perspective.

We didn’t intend to be in Iowa the same week as the presidential election caucuses. But the call came two days after Christmas, and soon we were on a plane to Sioux City. Mary, 79, died from complication of a stroke suffered four years before. There is a spiritual time known as “kairos.” It is not clock time. It happens when what you are experiencing is so profound that chronological time temporary loses its power.

“It’s an intimacy with the real,” Sister Florence Leone once explained to me. She founded Kairos House of Prayer in rural north Spokane years before silent contemplation became trendy.

Our newspaper obituary pages are filled with funeral notices now, because the death rate increases in January. Grief experts say that people hold on through the Christmas holidays and then let go. January is prime time for kairos experiences.

We watched caucus coverage on the television in our hotel room. One afternoon, we heard a rumor that Hillary Clinton was giving a speech down the street, at the Sioux City Art Center, where one of Mary’s paintings hangs on a gallery wall. We didn’t verify the rumor. The presidential campaigns seemed surreal, so it seemed fitting to watch them on TV.

That morning, Mary’s four boys, all middle-age men now, carried their mother’s casket from funeral home to hearse. Just a short distance, but their faces strained with the task. Mary was not heavy, but her casket was, and in kairos time, you contrast the heft of death with the featherweight lightness of newborns. Mary bore eight children in 10 years. And in those baby days, she moved 17 times, following her husband, Dan, as he built his national construction company.

All Mary’s children, and most of her grandchildren, and all three brothers and their wives, made it to the funeral. We live scattershot throughout the country, and Mary died in the busiest travel season, yet we all arrived in time to Sioux City. In kairos time, the chronological details somehow work out.

From the funeral home, we drove in procession to Calvary Cemetery. It was 7 degrees outside when we parked our cars near Mary’s grave and circled the gravesite, watching as cemetery workers lowered the vaulted casket into the ground.

On our last morning in Sioux City, we listened to the TV pundits do their postmortems on the caucus. Obama prevailed because he stands for change, they said.

In the afternoon, we sat with Mary’s husband, Dan. For several years, he drove to the nursing home three or four times each day to be with his wife. They were married for 57 years. She couldn’t speak, but she understood his words. She practiced writing her name. He did crossword puzzles. They played cards together.

We looked at pictures of Mary. She went from chubby-cheeked toddler to svelte bobby soxer to formidable wife and mother to late-blooming artist. Change happens, no matter how much or little you campaign for it.

We picked out one of Mary’s paintings for our home, then left to catch our plane back to Spokane, back to chronological time. In the Sioux City airport, women waiting at our gate proudly wore “Team Obama” sweatshirts. For a short while upon our return to Spokane, we saw things from a different, calmer perspective, the way you can after dwelling in the sacred time known as kairos.