Reflections on love

[I am still working on the sequel to my previous post, but this one jumped the queue.]

I have heard about love all my life without having a sense of how it was supposed to work. My oldest memories contain that word only twice. Once, as a stubborn young teen-ager, I was pulled aside by my mother and reprimanded for an act of rebellion with the words “Why do you feel you have to do that? We will give you whatever you need. You know we love you, don’t you?” Actually, I did not know, because that concept did not usually come into my parents’ vocabulary. And it remained recondite until I started to puzzle it out in later years.

The second instance was even more surprising. At a family meal, our father told us to pay attention for a minute. The five of us waited for his proclamation, which must have come after he was scolded (possibly by our mother) for making love too mysteriously abstract in our house. “Now listen,” he began, “because I’m going to tell you this only once, and don’t expect to hear it again. I love you.”

And with that he changed the subject and life continued as it always had.

I did not appreciate my father’s love for me until more than twenty years after he died, when I was writing a memoir about my early years. I often stopped to calculate how old he must have been when I was a punk of a certain age, and more than once I stopped in amazement at how he had responded to me – at how I would have reacted to my own children when I was the same age as he had been.

It would have helped if my early education had taught me something more about love than its place in the lexicon. But it did not. Now I realize how impossible it would be for me to acknowledge all the sacrifices my parents made for me, all the plans they set aside to accommodate me, all the instincts they followed to give me a more positive sense of self than I have seen in most of the people I have ever met.

I have recently lost one of the great loves in my life, a school friend from more than sixty years ago, who was offended by something I never intended two years ago, a man who has rebuffed every effort I have made to bring him back. I recognize that he remains hurt, and I grieve his pain every day.

Love is an attitude of caring. It requires forgiveness and understanding. It encompasses what you can give, not what you can get. And that causes the grief when somebody leaves or dies. Love does not disappear. It hangs on. The loss of a true friend makes the mind spin with no place to rest. Annie Dillard describes this situation beautifully in Holy the Firm:

The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other . . . is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit here. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother, when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

Der mentsh trakht un Gott lakht

It has always amused me that people could dismiss the complaints of others with the platitude that we all have to live with our choices.

It is sobering to realize that every choice we make, every action we take, however trivial, might have serious consequences, which move forward in an endless wave, affecting people through eternity. La Rochefoucauld said, “There is scarcely a single man sufficiently aware to know all the evil he does.” I believe we don’t know all the good we do, either. A few years ago I gave a frantic man a quarter for a parking meter. As he ran off, he yelled over his shoulder that I had saved his life. I will never know what effect I had on his family, his career. We can never even know how the lives of the strangers we pass on the street might be changed by the casual smile or scowl on our face. So how can we make wise decisions if we face some alternatives with only a superficial awareness of the consequences?

We are all familiar with the that’s-good-that’s-bad story. I was once stunned not to be hired as communications director in the Calgary office of the company I worked for. But the office closed six months later and the people who had interviewed me were back in Ottawa looking for new jobs. The eventual date of my dismissal from that company was one month after my sixtieth birthday. That meant I could not collect a lump sum payout but had to be content with what I thought was a paltry company pension. I resented having my choices limited; there was a fortune waiting for me in the stock market. But if I had invested the money on my own, market conditions would have cut my savings in half within three years. Not only did that not happen, but the company soon returned a significant portion of the money I had contributed to the pension fund over the years because it had accumulated excess funds. And my pension continues.

We can plan forever, but we must respond to reality, rolling with the punches and learning from the good as well as from the bad. The lessons can be profound.

Every choice we make limits our ability to do some other things. Every door might open on a new world of opportunity, or it might show us another door. Or it might take us out of the game altogether. As humans, we have only the most rudimentary sense of cause and effect. Even when we think we understand the consequences of our actions, we sometimes act in darkness, and often in a fog. It is almost impossible to escape the haze of shortsightedness that stands between us and our choices.

Sometimes it helps us cope with life to say we have lived by our principles, to believe that our actions have been guided by the best evidence, to assert our faith that everything will be all right in the end. In the broadest sense, we may find deep comfort in these beliefs. But when we hit the deepest ruts and the biggest bumps along the road, they are only words. It is no comfort to realize that our choices brought us to the present circumstances.

All of which leads me to my next post, which deals with some of the realities Catherine and I have had to face since we moved west six months ago.