fragility

There is a fragility to love that I didn’t understand eighteen years ago, though I glimpsed it that morning as I watched my mother die. She was unconscious. Her pain was managed. Her husband and four children were around her. Then she was gone, and we were left to begin learning the art of loving once you realize you have everything to lose. 

Fifteen years later, I lost again, this death sudden, the man I had thought I would grow old with. In a few days it’ll be the equinox, the seasonal reminder of his death on solstice, two and three-quarters years ago. 

Tonight I put on music while I cleaned the house, and to my own surprise, I started playing songs that had been an “our song” with different of my partners from days gone by. I Choose You, by Sara Bareilles. By My Side, by Sadet. Endless Love, featuring Mariah Carey. To my own surprise, they cut me, made me feel somehow deeply alone, and then I realized, well, what did I expect on a day like this? The cultural fairy tale is that you’ll live happily ever after. The reality is, you can lose for good the one you hold most dear. 

At the risk of sounding cliche, I have to say, this makes me love more, not less. It’s true that you hold your loved ones closer after a loss, you appreciate them more. And then pretty soon you’re back to snarking and picking petty fights, because you don’t stop being human when a loved one dies, you just hang suspended a little while. My feeling lonely tonight was only a case of projecting my grief: I miss my mother. 

There’s no replacing that person who knew you literally from the first moment of your life, there’s no replicating the knowledge of yourself held by the person who was your witness from the start. Mumma was my mirror. When she died, I lost a piece of my self-understanding, the part of me that had always been defined by how she reflected me back to myself. 

Eighteen years later, I still miss her, but the missing no longer stings—except occasionally, on days like today, when that vagrant thought wanders in, what would it be like if she’d lived? It’s a futile question. More useful is pondering the fragility of love, that no matter what, one way or another, I will lose the people I hold most dear. And yes, that’s scary. But it also allows me to hold love more gently than I used to, with cupped hands—recognizing that I never know when something may shatter. That love is more precious when I carry it alongside the awareness that at some point, inevitably, I will pay for it with pain—but let that come in its time; today, when the reality is sweetness, revel in it. 
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I learned I don’t have control over when I lose the people I love. I learned I do have control over loving as deeply and richly as I can, while I can. Love is fragile. I honor the pain of my own losses—and, side by side with that, more and more I celebrate the joy of those relationships, because none of them are lost to me in the end. ​