It is 3am, the hour of the black dog, and my heart is pounding, battering my chest like a bird flinging itself against the bars of a cage.
Let me out, she gasps. I’m wounded. I’m bleeding.
I press my hand to her wild thrashing, and say sweetheart, tell me. What’s wrong?
She begins to weep.
I didn’t sign up for this. No one told me that the friends I grew up with, the immortal ones, the dazzling forever young ones, would fall like trees in a forest, cancer, accidents, old age. No one said my heart, which I had given so freely, would shatter.
And when I chose to love one man, no one told me that to love so deeply also meant I might one day face his death, the loss of decades of companionship, of late-night confessions and later night loving. I did not understand that when I said yes I was also saying yes to the inevitability of loss and the grief that would split open my heart, yes to an unavoidable loss that still surprises me even with its certainty.
I did not ask to know about the unimaginable things grown men inflict on children. I did not want to have to imagine that child, her terror, the shattering of her belief that the world was safe. I did not ask to have her come to me looking for shelter and a warm place to lay her sweet young head.
I did not ask to know about concentration camps in America and the people dying there. I did not ask to see murder on the streets of our cities. I did not choose to open my heart to all the extinctions happening now and now and now, to be filled with the horror of witnessing these times of building and destroying, of unrepentant lies and rock-hard truths, of blood and bruise, heaven and hell, bone and ash all dancing in and out of shadow and light.
Let me out, my heart whimpers. I’ve had enough. I didn’t sign up for any of this.
But sweetheart, I say gently, you did sign up for this. Have you forgotten the moment you stood poised on the threshold before you leapt from the great luminous light of Holy Time into the arms of life, how you pledged yourself to learning how to love deeper, fuller, wider, until the boundaries between you and the other began to fade?
Do you remember how you said yes I will yes I do like a shy bride.
But no one told me it would hurt, she says quietly. No one said I would be broken and sorrowful and grieving losses too many to count. No one told me loving would hurt.
And would you choose not to love? I ask.
Would you trade the broken open you feel from loving so hard, for a safe corner where the lights are dim and you are untouched? Do you wish you had stayed curled up tight like a bud and never bloomed, never released your sweet scent to perfume the air?
Would you trade the love that awakens like the first light of dawn between two hearts learning to listen deeply to each other?
Love carries us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond, breaks open our hearts and stretches us to give more than we thought we had to give, and then asks for more. More time when we are tired, more money when we think we are tapped out, more attention to people easily overlooked, more patience, more compassion, because if we let our hearts break open we make room for the grieving, the wounded, the ones who are afraid to admit how much it hurts to love and to lose.
We start out dressed in white, worrying our prayer beads, lighting rose incense and soft candles throughout the night as we chant and try to levitate about the mess of the world. But love calls us to action, down the dusty road, across the raging river to feed the hungry, to care for the dying, dragging the hem of our white dress through the muck and ruin until it is tattered, until we lay our beads down so we can use two hands to push against the forces of the world that would deny us, jail us, deport us.
When we dare to say yes to love we join the tribe of the brokenhearted where joy dances barefoot to gypsy violins, and the songs of our tears and laughter are the lullabies that hush our babies to sleep.
It is 6am and my heart has finally settled. She comes to the water’s edge, steps lightly into the canoe, leaves paddles on the shore. No compass, no map, the current knows best, flowing always towards light, trusting love as her guide.
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Read mores stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available from Amazon.
Nancy London 