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.
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