Love carved into stone
30 December 2011 06:23 AM Categories: Quotidian existence
I’ve always been a fan of what a friend calls the “Irish sports pages.” The people I read about don’t have to be famous. Their deaths don’t need to be tragic. It does help if the story is good and the details specific.
During the boy’s most recent illness, I read through a special feature of the New York Times online, The Lives They Loved, as he watched a movie beside me. The Times invited readers to send in pictures and stories about loved ones who had died in 2011. I read through all 290 of them (skimming some), sometimes crying quietly in response to something particularly sad – the deaths of children, of the parents of small children, or of those who were simply too young to die always get me.
Two things struck me about the stories. One – there were several people who died this past year who were elderly and had been married for a very long time, sometimes over sixty years (and often the husband and wife died within a short time of each other). Two – out of the 290 stories, two came from people who heard of an old love’s passing – and each person hadn’t spoken to the old love in decades.
These were two sides of the same coin – decades of love and apparent devotion versus the fantasy of what could have been without the difficulties of years and money troubles and miscarriages, of colicky newborns and midlife crises, of cancer and dementia and the surprise snap of suddenly brittle bones.
I could make it all up, affection, a life, the way we can look at old couples and think that all along it was wonderful, that the love that exists at 18 and 30 and 45 lives until death, that the physical need for each other lasted through economic stress and the snot-streaked faces of children, through the days, months, or years when there was just no way that they could be in the same room together without resentment rising up. I like the idea myself, that love can last, or at the very least grow and change, so that at the end of a long life together couples still hold hands and talk and joke.
Even if there were difficult times, you wouldn’t read about them in an obituary, no matter how open the pair was in life about the ups and downs of marriage. We don’t expect candor in a death notice (though I did like the one on a grandmother who could be cranky and who said in her late nineties "it's better to go in your eighties" -- there's honesty). And anyway, death smooths over difficulty, the stories of those who have passed become soft with a slight sheen, or maybe no one tells the stories anymore, happy that the whole thing is over, that the struggles are done.
But I also want to believe the fantasy of an everlasting love, simple and basic, with just enough struggle to make the ending sweet, a place in which those of us who are halfway through (or more) can project our hopes for what is in store for us, despite the internal snap of crisscrossed wires and the prickly closeness, the push-pull of connection, dependence, and autonomy. Yes, this is what got under my skin about both the glossed-over marriages of fifty years or more and the romantic yearnings of people for loves from earlier, simpler times. They appealed to my idealistic, romantic side, the one that leads me to unrealistic expectations, who hopes for complete understanding without difficulty, for a place that I can rest despite my internal intimacy alarm system.
I want love to be easy. I want all the puzzle pieces to fit together. I want each of us to be free and clear of problems, able to devote ourselves fully to another while maintaining our necessary separateness. I want love to have clear skies. I want something that doesn't exist, something movie-style, love carved into stone, yet as comforting and soothing as a beloved old chair, something you can sink into when you need to rest. Except I don't sink into anything, not easily at any rate.
Nothing is simple, nor should it be. Deep love doesn't come cheaply or without complications, each person with their past and history, with their expectations and their own life path. That's ok. It's ok. It's what makes it interesting. It's what makes it worth it. And when the journey is over, you look back at the entire trip, the narrative, the phases, making sure to honor the difficulties and to pay homage to love that persisted in the face of human frailty.
Image by Henry Gray.
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