A man named George San once wrote: ‘There is only one happiness in this life to love and be loved in return...’
I have been blessed with this; and it is indeed ecstasy. It is what I hold most dear and protect most fiercely. It is the beginning and end of me and all that I encompass. Love is the beginning and The end of everything.
This morning, I attended a talk by a man who lost his wife and lifelong partner to brain cancer. His account was heartbreaking to say the least but then he read an essay written by his daughter, about her mother’s death, and I was emotionally tipped over the edge.
She wrote: ‘... and the reason we can never heal is because the love never goes away...’
Just let that sink it.
Her words broke my heart into a million pieces because they echo a sentiment I have held for years, one which I happened to be pondering while driving to this talk; that in matters of the heart, it’s not the love that leaves us, it’s the person only.
The love, and not the pain, is the obstacle to healing
We mistake the pain of the loss for an absence of the love. We try to replace or mask that love with something else: hate, resentment, disappointment, and heartbreak. But really it’s the love that we now have to hold inside of us, unexpressed, because it’s target is no longer in reach, that wounds us on an internal loop.
To say that I have lost love is not exactly accurate then. The target of love has been lost to me on numerous occasions. Soul mates of all shapes and sizes.
One of my soul mates is a city. A dog. A history teacher. Best friends. Grandparents. A place in time. Another heart.
But I have never lost the love; only the object of love’s affections.
If true love existed then, indeed it exists, still.
Love is eternal. Once your heart connnects into that frequency with an outside receptor, then that love exists forever (and indeed always existed before).
When you meet that person and your souls collide, a connection is completed and a cycle is created that can never be undone.
Naturally when one of the two is removed for whatever reason the pain is excruciating. The loss of an emotional limb. A whole that can never be refilled.
And still the love remains within us. Unchanneled. A wound.
Sometimes it’s easier to walk away from some mirrors of love because the pain of holding it to oneself is easier than the pain of engagement. But what about this child. This magnificent young girl who will hold her aching heart until she meets her mom again. And all those who ache to love those who are no longer there, close enough to love, but certainly not unloved.
I think a fair summary would be:
‘The love you withhold is the pain you carry’ -
by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
