On love and grief

Photo credit: Marianne Møllmann 2020

Where does love go, when it goes away? This was a frequent question from my daughter as she was growing up. All around her, including in her own family, adults were divorcing, forever-constellations shifting, creating significant earthquakes in her world.

This is not an easy question to answer, even for myself. What even is love, let alone how does it travel after hours and when the people we associate it with are gone?

I sat with this question this morning, as I woke up to the news that the mother of one of my oldest friends had died, quietly, in her sleep, last night.

If I were to describe my friend’s mother in one word, I would say love. Love for flowers, for people, love for her family and anyone in contact with it. I have concrete memories of her bestowing that love on me in the form of shelter and care when I most needed it. Her home was one of comfort for me, always. Even towards the end, as she was mostly wordless and motionless, even as she often slept, she emanated love. Where does that love go?

I used to tell my daughter love can’t disappear, it just changes form. It goes into the great unknowable-but-knowable love that is all around us, that we each get to bring out in the world. The notion that love is in everything is a core tenet of the spiritual tradition I have come to call mine, but it is also my lived experience: it is what I know to be true, because it is.

And here is the key, unsolvable paradox.

Even as I know love is possible, potential, lodged in everything and everyone, I also know it is not inevitable. We have to choose it and so many times we manifestly do not. This is a source of never-ending grief, and in that grief too there is love.

And so I sit.