On The Best and Worst Possible Thing

Cold Lake AB / Denesųłiné territory

The Weighing
by Jane Hirshfield

The heart's reasons

seen clearly,

even the hardest

will carry

its whip-marks and sadness

and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved

eland forgives

the drought-starved lion

who finally takes her,

enters willingly then

the life she cannot refuse,

and is lion, is fed,

and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

 

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The year before last was word heavy. I wrote more than 50,000 words for my master’s thesis, and maybe twice that in journal entries, poetry, and blog posts. This past year though, was different. I haven’t written much besides to-do lists and emails and love poems. 

Here’s what happened: 12 months ago, almost to this very day, I fell in love with an incredible woman. It was a whirlwind, long-distance romance. We met at a week-long spiritual retreat in July, visited each other for a few days in August and September, and then in October both promptly broke down and confessed our mutual intention to make the other one our wife. It’s without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me and it’s transformed me to my very core and I haven’t written a single public word about it. 

It’s hard to write about being in love. So much has been said on the topic it’s hard to add anything without sounding cliche (and being in love is very cliche). Moreover, writing about being in love is also a little bit like writing about winning the lottery––some readers will feel happy for you , but others will somewhat resent you. I know this because I felt resentment when I was single and had to hear about, or worse, witness, people in love. I was convinced they were exaggerating how good it was just to feel superior to the rest of us. And now, although I do still think couples in love can sometimes play it up a bit too much (us included), I can also confirm (and believe me, the avoidantly attached part of my ego does regret to report): 

True love is truly as good as they say. 

True love makes life make sense again. It’s like when you were a kid and just waking up in the morning to a day of eating fruit and playing in the sandbox and going swimming made life have a point. The point was to eat fruit and play in the sandbox and swim. When you’re in love, the whole point of life is to be in love. That’s it. It’s really the best. The whole point is to adore one another. To gaze at your beloved constantly, tucking away every tiny little detail you can about who they are and what they want and what they like. To surprise each other with small cute things that you know will make them smile. To celebrate and delight in each and every one of their weird habits and charming eccentricities, and to do so fervently and passionately and without pause. 

I consider myself a relatively reasonable person but I am 100% convinced my fiancée, April, is the most perfectly loveable person to ever live. I adore her so completely it is sometimes physically overwhelming. It can feel cosmic, like I am channeling something infinite. As if the whole universe is deliriously happy that she exists and is asking me to tell her. And man, do I ever tell her. Like it’s my full-time job. My life’s work. And, you know what, I’m pretty sure it is. Maybe it's cliche to say (is it?) but I do truly believe that loving her and making her feel loved are the two most important reasons I am here on earth. And what a joyous calling to have stumbled / army crawled into (suffice to say singledom was not been easy for either of us). We both feel so unbelievably grateful. We say this all the time. We are so, so lucky to have found each other. 

Okay… So I guess I can write about being in love. I guess it’s actually not that hard, it’s just a bit vulnerable.

There is another reason though, that I didn’t write much this past year about being in love. It’s because our love story has been complicated by the fact that the last 12 months have been the hardest of April’s life. She had two deaths in her immediate family and now has a third loved one dying of pancreatic cancer. She’s losing her family. 

Last month, I moved across the continent to be with her and it's a bit like swimming down to join someone at the bottom of the ocean. Unbelievably bleak and sad and heavy. Sure, sometimes grief is busy doing everything the teachers said it would. It’s bringing April and me closer, weaving our hearts together tighter than we ever imagined. It’s giving us access to so many precious moments with family and friends. It’s allowing people to share stories and laughter, to give and accept care, and to cry and be honest with each other in ways that are otherwise incredibly difficult. 

But, the thing is, even with all those moments, it’s not even close to being “all for the best” (something, I swear to God, some people are still out here saying to the bereaved despite all the grief education telling you not to). Death is a terrible terrible thing, especially when it happens to someone who is much too young, as it did in this case. The grief you feel over a death like this, the grief my partner feels, is, so much of the time, too cruel and painful to be anything but that. 

What do you do when the best possible thing happens with the person you love most, and the worst possible thing happens to the person you love most, both at the same time? 

One spiritual teacher I’ve listened to, angel Kyodo williams, talks about love as spaciousness. From the first moment I heard it, the concept resonated with me, like I could feel more space in myself just hearing her say those words. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, probably because this past year has been a time when my partner and I really need that spaciousness. We really need room within us (and between us) to feel some very big and very different feelings all at once––grief, love, fear, gratitude. And, we really need room for multiple things to be true at once––it’s true that the dead are gone. And it’s true that they are still very much with us. 

I’m trying to make space for all these things. Or maybe, all these things are trying to make space inside of me. That’s more what it feels like. Like life is stretching me out from the inside. I don’t know how much intentionality I can attribute to this stretching. It seems less like the universe is trying to teach me a lesson and much more like this is just the logic of being alive. Like this is just the way life is––always asking more of us, always pulling us towards something, compelling us to move deeper into love and into loss. 

Life has asked a lot of April and me this past year. And infinitely more of her as she grieves some of the worst losses she could have ever imagined. Throughout it all though, we have held tight to the torrential flood of love and adoration we have for each other. 

And, for myself, I can say that it really does feel like the love I have for her is flooding into me from somewhere outside of me. Sometimes I wonder if some of it is coming to me from those she’s lost. The ones who have also, although we don’t often describe it this way, lost her. They’ve lost their earthly way of loving her. So maybe they had to find me, bring me to her so that I could love her in the way they no longer can. Love her in flesh and blood. Maybe they need me to complete something with her. 

And maybe the more I let my love be spacious, the more they can tell her what they need to. 

Wherever it’s coming from though, the only thing that makes sense to do is to let love happen. Let it move through me, making space for more of itself. Let it stretch me and stretch me and stretch me until I don’t know where I end and the world begins. Let it change me and then compel me to pass it along so it can change someone else. 

Right now the only thing that makes sense to do is be in love with the woman of my dreams, the woman I can’t wait to create more and more love with. To grieve alongside her. To admire her and cherish her. To adore her. 

Maybe I’ll even write about it. 

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