Love
by Susan Weber
My neighbors are posting pictures on their windows every few days for kids to discover when out with their families. Wanting to do my part, I found the old markers, some of which still had juice, and colored a silly face for the window. It came out a bit strange, disquietude leaking through the paper. A few days later we were asked to draw an animal. Flourishing purples and pinks, I based my work on a kitten from the internet. My six year old friend assured me my animal looked like an evil cute puppy. She was right of course, but making art with one goal only—spread the love—was a lot of fun.
Which brings me to assignment number three: encouraging words. In the interest of marker preservation I ruled out phrases like wash your hands, Ohio strong (lifted from the daily Statehouse briefing), elbows please, and we’re in this together. I needed a one word slogan, short and pointed.
What about love? Well, what about it? It’s a word writers have trouble with. Phrases like, “over-used as it may be…” and “though it’s lost some meaning in the modern world…” or “not to sound cliché here…” are typical avoidance techniques. But love isn’t cute, or hackneyed, or saccharine now, and neither is it blind. We know exactly what and whom we love: our lives and the people in them. Stack up all the objects and certainties we had before in a giant pyre and burn it to the ground. One solidity remains, intrepid as our quiet governor, shifting through priorities one by one. Love says, “Trust me. Remember me. We can handle this, all of it, if we do the work.”
Lately I’ve been nursing my doubts by flitting from chat to email to endless news consumption to chugging down podcasts on my walks. This is another kind of panic bingeing, disguised as socially responsible engagement. By the end of the day I’m spent. I’ve told myself my behavior’s an involuntary reaction to a roiling world, but I really do know better. Which comes back to the matter at hand. Love.
One thing I’ve learned is the work of feeling pain. When your dear heart dies, maybe you go numb for awhile or maybe you frenetically impersonate the socially appropriate widow. In my case I did both. It wasn’t until I stopped and dared feel my loss, our children’s loss, and my husband’s loss of us, that I could remember love. Strong love. Communal love. Competent, respectful love that honors death with sorrow.
My plan is to heed my own encouraging word. For me this will mean to sit with the knowledge that all over the world people are dying alone, in pain, in fear, in ever greater numbers. It will mean giving up distractions even in my cozy isolation. So I can love the sick and dying, the helpers, the families left behind, and every other person with skin in the game. All of us.
One might ask what good it does to love in isolation. But we don’t ever love alone. We’re coloring signs so people can see, on their daily walks, the ubiquitous certainty of love.
Photo by Susan Weber CC BY-SA 4.0