I was watching " Seven Pounds" with my husband several weeks ago. The scene is irrelevant, but at one point during the movie, something washed over me that is barely accountable in words. The kind of desperate sobs I emitted are by now not strange to my husband; he tightened the circle his arms made around me and pressed his head closer to mine, as if to better hear and interpret my reverberations and gurglings. I felt, with a surety that clenched my whole ribcage and sucked the air from my lungs, how unbearable it will be to lose him to death. Beyond that, I have run out of words. To account for how long and how deeply this feeling racked me, this glimpse of a particular, eventual bereavement, I have to borrow words from Stuart Townend's hymn "How Great the Father's Love for Us":
How great the pain of searing loss...
Perhaps it is my conviction that very few of us actually have one single "soul mate" to find in the world, but rather a handful of people with whom we could find love and happiness. Perhaps it is my utter lack of certainty in nearly all worthy endeavors prior to making that leap of commitment, and taking the first steps that, gaining momentum, convince me that this was my path all along. Perhaps it is the happy contradiction that my husband defies the model of compatibility I would have chosen when we first became friends, and when I was looking elsewhere for love--that our friendship, and then our romance, have been a pleasurable experiment across culture, affiliation, lifestyles and temperament. Each of these things precludes for me the kind of immutable "in love" experience where we are both deadsure that "we are meant to be together." I deal in endless possibility, and so am able to hypothesize what life would have been like if we had chosen different people, different paths. But in the aftermath of losing my mother and grandmother--two women who I could not have chosen but who rather chose me--I have encountered a new kind of certainty about the people I am committed to. It would be morbid to base everything on this, but allowing the possibility of someone's absence to sneak up on me, to imagine for a moment life after their departure, is quite helpful in determining how much they mean to me, how intertwined our lives have become. The strength of my grief parallels the strength of my love for my husband: I know only that without him, life would be shabby, so many shades of grey, that my howling would go on for months--even years--upon discovering his absence. It is proof of the thing's existence by the vacuum, the shockwaves felt in its absence--about as close as I can get to being deadsure of anything.
...
The stone was semiprecious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too smart to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day
We lit ourselves on fire
Oh, God not deny her
It's not if I believe in love
but if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me
...
U2 "Moment of Surrender" from 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon
I have been grappling with this concept a bit too, but in regards to community. The beauty of and necessity for those around us is most keenly present when we note their absence. In visiting my parents' house, I note now a particular lack of sound that I miss. Grandma would often come over to their house, and twiddle gibbering melodies on the piano. It isn't until the sounds are gone that I realize how much I miss them, miss her.
ReplyDeleteThanks once again for sharing your thoughtful reflections!