Grief — Love With No Place to Go

Grief shows up in lots of different ways. I’ve said this before: Grief has many parts. And lately I’ve been noticing that, without Jon alongside me day in and day out, my love for him has had no place to go all these months and years since his death. And that has made me sad.

When Love Feels Like Duty

Love is a word I don’t much like to use. It is vague. It is show-offy. It is used so casually, so cynically these days. Those Christmas cards and birthday cards proclaiming Love! Peace! Joy! What do they mean by love anyway?

So often, “love” feels more like a duty, a virtue to strive for, something you are supposed to feel — not something that you come by naturally, if left to your own devices.

The fact is we humans are good at loving. We need to do it. We don’t have to be brow-beaten into doing it. We do it.

Grief — Love With No Place to Go

Now that I’m in my elder years, I’ve come to think that loving some one, some thing — a person, a dog, a place — is a basic human need alongside sleeping, eating and doing what we do to procreate and, once we’ve done that, what we do as we escort our children into adulthood.

I noticed this human tendency to love during my recent travels through the Midwest as I spent time with relatives — with my daughter, my son and his children, my son’s wife and his in-laws. With cousins on both side of my family.

What I noticed was how much love I felt, not just for my children and grandchildren, that’s easy, but for the people I’m not as close to — the cousins I knew when we were kids together in the towns and woods of Michigan. My son’s in-laws, whom I met not long after our children met.

And for all the familiar places, the beaches, the lakes, the towns, my grandmother’s 130-year-old house, the dance pavilion my great-grandparents built 100 years ago.

In Jackson, Michigan, I visited a cousin. In Pentwater, Michigan, more cousins. At a lake resort in the northern woods, my close family and in-laws.

This was a two-and-a-half week trip and my sadness and grief for Jon slipped away — because, I suspect, my love for him had someplace to go for a time.

‘If You Can Love . . .’

A wise older friend back in my single woman days once said to me, “If you can love, you can’t be hurt.”

I puzzled over those words back then. I had been single way too long and my big goal was to get somebody I loved to love me enough to marry me. It was not clear how being able to love was going to get me to where I wanted to go. How could loving keep me safe, psychologically speaking?

Now That I’m Older Than My Wise, Old Friend

But I remember those words even today because they were so remarkable, so counterintuitive.

Right now I am older than my friend was when he told me this, and I think I finally get it.

Back from my summer travels, I thought about the people I was with on that trip. There were so many people, I noticed, that I loved.

One of the perks of getting older, I realized, is that by now you’ve collected up a lifetime of people you love. High school friends. Workplace friends. Neighbors. Grandchildren. Your therapist. The UPS guy.

The other perk is you’re not paying all that much attention to whether they love you back.

At this point in our lives, we’ve checked all the boxes: We’ve had the careers. We’ve earned a living. We’ve had the spouses and the kids, if we wanted them, or come to terms with not having them. We grew the tulips and the artichokes.

We’ve done our do, and there’s not a whole lot left for us to do now except notice the people around us and love them.

More about motherhood from afar at “A 28-Year-Old in the Hospital — 2000 Miles Away.”   More about missing Jon at “A Widow’s Christmas Card.”