A few thoughts on Love –

Life is fragile – Love is both holy and hard – and Love will break us, time and again. And what, after all, can we do but hang on for the ride?

Yesterday, my friend Lorraine suffered a major, and unexpected, heart attack while she was waiting for Rick to bring her morning coffee. She’s still alive, but her brain shows no activity. Everyone is gathering around – as much as anyone can in these Covid times – waiting and deciding and grieving, even though she’s still here.

Last week, another friend’s husband died after several courageous struggles with cancer. And a month ago, C’s daughter had a major stroke and passed away even though she was only 50 years old.

And still – this morning – the Sumac behind my house is blooming and shifting in a breeze, surrounded by honeybees who are so crazily happy. And – this morning I saw the bluest bird ever, just drop onto the ground and peck away at seed as I stood by stunned by its beauty before it darted into a nearby shrub. And – Bodi drove me crazy with having to sniff every single cluster of leaves along our walk. And – the goldfinches flitted through the sprinkler’s showery spray to eat damp seed. And – my knees are especially achy after yesterday’s garden work.

So it’s another day – another gorgeous and hard-working day – another hopeful and trembling day – another breathing-in and falling-down and getting-up-again day – as we all wait for Lorraine to let go.

Love is sacrifice. If you’ve lost someone who was part of you, you’ve been broken open. If you’ve dared to love, you’ve put your life on the line. There’s no escaping that fact. When you dare to love, when you release your heart, even if you hadn’t intended it to happen, you’ve given yourself over and there’s no going back.

Every day lately, I smother my 13 year old dog with kisses. In these times I’ve started to call VirusVille, I haven’t been touched by a human being for three months. I still see people; I can walk with a cousin or a friend, and chat. Or I can pick up lunch and sit (carefully distant) with a daughter in a park to catch up. But there’s no touching. For the foreseeable future, Bodi is my guy – my snuggle muffin. And he’s getting older by the second.

I think a lot about love these days, about how much we need to give and to receive love. For now, Bodi fills that need. But he’s aging. I can see differences in how he walks, in how much time it takes him to catch up with me on our morning jaunts. He stumbles sometimes, he needs more naps than he used to, and his spunkiness is short-lived. So I know we’re headed toward the end. I might have another few more years, and those will be sweet. But I know he’ll break my heart.

Loving him so much already breaks my heart. But love is a commitment, a continual, wrenching risk, a sacrifice. A sacrifice of solitude, a sacrifice of security, and of insular living. If I dare to love, I know full well I’ll be broken in the end. Love is emotionally expensive, and the cost of love is loss. We can try to hedge our bets, protect ourselves from caring too much, but then what’s the meaning of a life?

There’s no way around it: love is all – love will slay us, and even when we are slain, we’ll never regret giving ourselves away. Giving all. Being a sacrifice. For what are we, if not sensing and sentient beings? Love is our becoming. We become love. We have to share Love, again and again and again.

I recently read a quote from Author Louise Erdrich – about life and love and pain and how to get by:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It’s the reason you are here on Earth. You have to risk you heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

May we all have to courage to risk our hearts, despite the pain.

(For Jeff, who is gone, and for Gail who made the Sacrifice; for C, who loved even when it was hard; and for Lorraine, waiting her turn to say Goodbye.)

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