I've often wondered if love is a choice or if it is something in our DNA where the object of our love draws it out of us. We seem to be able to choose not to love, to stop loving but whether it is the person we are attracted to which grows into love or the baby whose very presence seems to magnetize love right out of us, it's as if the love is extracted from us
If, or maybe when, we love we can be assured that at some point we will be hurt. There will be loss and grief but we tend not to worry about that even though it may be inevitable.
A small, Episcopal parish in South Seattle experienced that inevitability when their much loved priest died after a battle with cancer. Tending to their loss they discovered a grief specialist named Richards Beekman, an Episcopal priest, who offered them a two day conference on grief. Beekman came recommended as a scholar who combined his own experience of grief with years of study on the subject of death.
He began the conference with a powerful story from his youth, poignant and yet inviting in its universality. At 6 years old he and his best friend spent many days in an orchard near their homes. He remembered one day in particular: lying on his back with his friend as they watched the clouds pass over the trees. As the best of friends they quietly enjoyed the simple warmth and pleasant joy of soaking up creation.
Since he was speaking on death and grief, one got the idea that this setting was not going to last and sure enough in the next breath he offered the experience that had stayed with him:
He came to the orchard the next day only to find out that his best friend had died of meningitis the previous night. Folks sat listening to him and many no doubt thought, 'It would take years to get over such a tragedy!"
But Richards seemed to be reading our minds or perhaps he just had years of experience in dealing with the American culture's response to death and grief for in the next moment, he proclaimed an exceptional truth in regard to grief.
"That death was 55 years ago and I have not gotten over it and I don't intend to do so. People tell us all the time to 'get over it' but I'm here to tell you that I loved my friend and I continue to love him so getting over my grief would mean getting over my love for him--something I will never do, nor do I want to." He went on to describe that the hurt does heal and the pain lessens but that "getting over a death" is antithetical to the love we have for the one who has died. We might as well be told: Stop loving the one we loved.
Love can hurt when the inevitable loss happens but love is forever and is not something to get over in order to staunch the pain.