openpalm

Having lost love, I’d like to find it again.

Borrowing on the wisdom of affirmations, I’d like to set down here what love is. I’d like to try to imagine / visualize / hear from others what real love looks like, how you know when you’ve found it, how you keep it over the long run.

february 17, 2009
My son, aged 11, getting to see his 1/2 brother, aged 22, after not seeing each other for over a year. It looks like this: small boy grinning, reaching over a little awkwardly and with great fervor to large brother, who bends over to meet him and as they hug, one of them (it doesn’t matter which one) says, “Bro!”

december 4, 2008
How to make love go right, and not go wrong?

My vet, giving therapy to me while examining my cat, said “you’d be surprised how many problems in pets are because of problems in their human families.” We chatted more, to find we both have toubled children, adopted. At one point she looked at me, tired beyond belief saying “I really thought that love would be enough!”

july 28, 2008
From Patrick Lane’s, What the Stones Remember, written about love, marriage and his lover of 22 years…

I sit here by the pond and wonder what it is in me that refuses marriage. There seem to be a thousand reasons and none. The very word reason disturbs me. It smacks of logic and thought and I know they have nothing to do with love. The truth is I’m afraid. I’m afraid of love because love has always hurt me. It sounds pathetic when I say that. I’m sixty-two years old. Surely I’m past such a childlike explanation?

I scour my mind even though I know my mind has nothing to do with my fear… For hours I listen to the committee of voices in my mind talking to me about the should and the shouldn’t, the why and the why not. Finally I banish the voices. They are a cacophony of dissidence and doubt and allowing them to spin their complicated arguments is just the way I have of avoiding any kind of decision.

I think I’m almost healthy for the first time in more than forty years and I also think I’m seeing with a clarity I’ve never had before. Marriage to me has always equaled psychic, emotional, and spiritual pain. But that does’nt mean another marriage equals them. Why wouldn’t I ask her to marry me? Why not now?…

Three days later I get up, make my coffee, and before going outside to sit in the early dawn I stand at the end of our bed and look at my woman as she sleeps. The night was warm and all that covers her now is a cotton sheet. Her form, the bend of her leg and the curve of her hip, are beautiful. Her bare shoulders are beautiful. I watch her breathing and I am undone by my love for her. I glance at the bureau and see my gift to her, an antique jade necklace, lying where she left it after we came home from the restaurant last night. We will marry in three weeks. I touch her hair lightly and then go out to the garden. I feel as if i have passed through a veil.

july 20, 2008
There’s no way I can do justice to Stephen King’s tale of his being hit by a car, the arrival of emergency crews, of almost dying even as the paramedics are jollying him into believing that he won’t. It’s on pages 253-270 of On Writing.

It’s a passage about almost dying. It’s also a passage about love.

SK leaves his house for a daily walk, with the intent of being back to this house in time to go with his wife, Tabitha, and kids to a movie. He is hit head-on by a blue van that has just crested the hill he is walking up. He recounts crystal clear observations intermingled with episodes of passing out. He describes the emergency medical technicians actions, and he relates asking several times, “am I going to die?” He asks this with good reason (his injuries are quite phenomenally awful.) They rush him to the hospital at 110 miles per hour over patched and bumpy back roads. The first hospital takes one look at him and says “we can’t deal with that here” and helivac him to another hospital. En route his lung collapses.

Still breathing in great leaky gulps, I am lifted out of the helicopter. Someone bumps the stretcher and I scream. “Sorry, sorry, you’re okay, Stephen,” someone says — when you’re badly hurt everyone calls you by your first name, everyone is your pal.

“Tell Tabby I love her very much,” I say as I am first lifted and then wheeled, very fast, down some sort of descending concrete walkway. All at once I feel like crying.

“You can tell her yourselve,” the someone says….

“When?” I ask. “When can I tell her?”

“Soon,” the voice says, and then I pass out again.

I want someone in my life who would want, in supreme extremity, to tell me that he loved me. Someone who understands that love is as important as death. That love, in the face of death, is all that really matters.