The Pain of Loving Others
I lost my closest friend to lung cancer 16 years ago this summer. I wasn’t with her the hour she died but I was at her bedside in the days just before. I was completely helpless as she slipped away. All I could do was wait, and love, and pray and later cry.
The pain of her death will never completely go away. I don’t think about it every minute, not even every day anymore. But it’s lurking there in the background of my existence, a great sorrow joining in the dull ache of missing others I have lost.
I believe grief isn’t something we ever get over. We aren’t meant to. It’s remains there as one of living’s hallmarks that gets etched upon our hearts and souls and takes its place in changing us and sculpting who we eventually turn out to be.
I survived breast cancer 27 years ago. What might have been a sad stumbling block for those who cared about me turned into a much happier ending for them and a wake- up call to discover the truth and meaning of my own existence for me.
That adventure and the age we live in have brought me to a lonely place and led me to the point where choosing to care about others propels me to be proactive and reach out. I always do so awkwardly, never quite able to find the right words or gestures—but I try. It means rising from the numbness of resting comfortably in 21st century isolation with its thousands of media distractions and choosing instead to risk rejection and ridicule.
And as I do, I have to answer each time the very same question: Do I choose to care and hope to love and accept that it will end in loss someday and I will feel the pain of grief and tears yet again? Do I open my heart to that future ache to become close to others despite what I know awaits?
Or should I become something not quite human, stone cold, perhaps, like the singer in Simon & Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock” cynically observing “if I never loved I never would have cried.”
Because if we choose to care about anyone at all the grieving can’t be vanquished—not yet, not in this life. It’s merely postponed. Loss will come and it will hurt. As long as we care, sickness and death of those we lend our hearts to–who have leant their hearts to us–will wound us and leave unrelenting scars. And we will have to decide how to go on living with the sorrow.
But that is what love and life call us to. To deal with the inevitable sadness, whether we do it with a strong faith in God and something beyond this life or whether we just focus on the memories of happier times.
We cannot escape this call completely, even if we run from it or bury it deep into our psyche into the dark room called “Never To Think About Again.” Even if we’ve slammed shut that door shut and placed a million locks upon it.
Love calls us to care and caring sometimes hurts and so the choice is a simple but not easy one.
Do we push all others away from the lives we so neatly set up and try to avoid feeling any loss at all? Shall we make excuses for not caring and not loving and wake up each day feeling we have gotten away with not being hurt by loss and the burden of care and grieving for one more 24-hour period and so have cheated sorrow?
Is this a game we even want to win, or even to play?
Or do we decide to reach out and love others for its own reward even as we accept the pain and tears that doing so will inevitably bring to our doorstep?
Love calls us to make this choice wisely.