How Love is Defined..
December 16, 2008 by Anna Farmery
Filed under Affirmations of Life
Thinking about life today, I wondered….
Can you really define love in life, or does it need death to truly define your love?
I think I thought I could define love during life but now I think it needs death to define that love for you…what do you think?
Could I define our love before he died? Yes. Absolutely. I tried to explain to someone who has one of those ‘I really shouldn’t have married her but what do you do after 21 years’ marriages. Love isn’t something you just feel, and emotion and description of a feeling. It is a verb. It is something you do. I also told him I adored my husband, absolutely and utterly and I had never regretted time spent with him.
I am lucky enough to be able to say even before he became ill I used to tell my husband he was ‘THE’ thing in my life and my only complaint was I didn’t get enough of his time because I never could get enough of it. That we were both lucky that the biggest complaint was not enough time together – not that we’d had enough of each other. How poetic that seems now I have all this time and no him to share it with. He once sent me a card which said ‘I wish I’d found you sooner, so I could have loved you longer’. I still have it. I just couldn’t throw it away even then, when I still had him.
How I define my love for him can’t change, there is nothing this perspective changes about how I see it other than – just too damn short a time.
One of the biggest regret is that my love is now static. It won’t grow and change as we did. Only I now change, he will always look as he did in his last photos. No new experiences to laugh and talk over together.
My biggest regret is I didn’t look after him more and stop him getting ill, or if I had got him to the Doctor before the cancer was too far gone. These things and more define his death and my loss. The love is unadulterated and unchanged just lost without him.
Does that make sense? I can’t see a way death can alter my understanding of what we had. I was lucky/unlucky? enough to have past experiences that made me understand how very transient life was and how precious love is. I always had a fear we wouldn’t get old together.
Debi
Oh wow what a wonderful relationship you had. I suppose for me, I knew I loved him….I loved our life and yes we had a beautiful relationship but….
It was the death that brought the true depth, the true meaning of the absolute love, the absolute moulding of 2 souls. I don’t think I fully understood the power until one half taken away for ever….
I love the fact that you had that before being apart..you are a lucky lady and clearly he was one lucky man
Thank you, I always felt lucky till now, no even now. His last words, after not speaking for days, when he should have been incapable of speach, were ‘I love you’ – clear and loud. I would have thought I was making it up out of grief and wishful thinking but my friend stayed with me to catch me when I fell and heard it loud and clear too. I am incredibly lucky to have such friends too.
Knowing doesn’t change it. Love just is what you do every day together. It’s like the sea, you don’t have to know how deep it is to swim and be happy.
I used to tell him I didn’t know how much I loved him because I never reached the edges, not once. I told him he stretched it thin in places, very thin sometimes (only human after all!) but never reached anywhere close to the edges.
Not knowing how much until after they have gone is a bit like that. Not having to try to define it until you suddenly have to see if there is an end. Bet the answer to that is – no, there is no end – and that is probably the only reason you had to look at all because deep down your heart knew. Just needed to make sure.
Loosing it is still the same.
Thank you for the thought. x
In the novel Stranger in a Strange Land Jubal Harshaw describes love as the condition in which the happiness of another is essential to your own. As to being “only human” we are the pinnacle of evolution and gods finest creation which enables us to appreciate how much sweeter Love is for having known sorrow.
Sean I love those words….to appreciate love for having known sorrow…gosh I relate so well to that. I suppose it must be true, when you fall in love then two souls really do become one
How true.I went out with my own true loves only possible adversary tonight. Gaz the Man. All ways and always. x Love u Gaz. How lucky x. Happy, happy me. Now? I have to find my own way. Being happy without him is a challenge but then it is what I have been given to deal with. My own happiness was found in him. Now I have to redefine it even when I don’t want to.
It is a time of silence
for our gathering of souls
In this time of quiet reflection
on the love that we have known
And though we must now be apart
reunion is our goal
In that timeless ever after
where we’ll no longer be alone
Two souls can never truly be parted. They are in time and space always next to each other. Only the physical dies. When at last both parts of the physical fall away the barriers come down and the space between disappears. There is no difference to keep you apart.
….just reading the comments brings tears to my eyes…not purely painful ones, but also tears of wonderful memories. I will post that poem this week if that is OK?
Happy holidays to one and all
A xxx