Raise Your Hand If....

You cannot relate to this one!
 

Isn't it true sometimes that the cost of love is very high?  I am not just talking about romantic love but all kinds of love.  To love is to be vulnerable to loss, to grief, to sorrow and to great happiness and joy.  Love is risking those possibilities, and yet being open to the experience is always a great teacher. 

My friend of 23 years died somewhat unexpectedly last week.  The memories have been abundant, both joyful and happy and sorrowful as I watched her lose her memory and brilliant mind a little at a time until she did not remember me anymore.  That was a hard experience for both of us.  She felt her mind slipping away and would talk with me about it. I pray I will always have her memory with me as long as I live.  I believe that the deeper the love for another person the greater the loss and sorrow you will feel.  A part of you is changed because of the love you shared and when they are gone that deep emptiness that washes over you is difficult.  The memories become so bittersweet.  Loss is always a time of great introspection and solitude and for me often melancholy.  The grief we feel is for that loss, even when we know the other person is better off, we miss them terribly.

But I have learned that loving another person is about them not necessarily about you.  It is something you give.  If you are blessed to get it in return, all the better.  But the greater part of joy is in the giving of it and the way it feels to love someone.  And that is the part you get to keep even though they have gone.

When the longing returns you try to force yourself to remember that and keep going.  Hearts get broken because they do what hearts do best...they love and take a chance and something good always comes of that.  I'd rather have a broken heart any day over a heart that is incapable of choosing love at all.  To quote a line from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, "To love another person is to see the face of God."  We will all know His face well one day if we have loved at all.