Love Can’t Die
What a beautiful experience it is to see something with such utter clarity. Today, while I was putting together lunch, I happened to think of Lois Brown, who died some years ago at ninety. We’d known each other since I was about six. Her kids had been my schoolmates, and we developed a friendship that lasted until she died fifty-five years later. She was thirty years older than I, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. She always felt like pure love, and more like an ageless friend than a contemporary of my parents.
Over the years since she died, whenever I happened to think of her, it was with a tinge of loss, as though something had been taken from me. Today when I thought of her, I had a completely different experience. I felt no sense of loss, and I saw something I already knew, but on a completely different level, a felt level. It was clear that nothing had been taken, and that all the love between us was exactly as it had always been.
Now, I’ve known for years that those words are true, or thought I knew. The insight that came to me today had nothing to do with words. I felt the love that always existed between us and could see that nothing had been changed by her death. The love that was between us when she was living is still as present and fresh as it had ever been.
If this is true for the love I felt for and received from Lois, it’s true for the love between me and everyone who’s gone before me, because what I saw is something that’s true about the nature of love.
Our family and friends die, but the love between us doesn’t.
I’m at an age where all my relatives and friends from the generation before me are gone. What a gift to see that all that love is still here for me to bathe in. How could it possibly die if love is what we’re made of?
