One Who Loves Me

Someone for Whom I Am Life

He was young to have a stroke, but that didn’t make it any less debilitating. No one knew how much of his old self he’d recover. When I met him, his right arm was cramped, his fingers unwieldy. Speaking was not easy. He needed help with simple tasks. His nurse said he often refused to try to feed himself or brush his teeth. He seemed to have lost the will to live.

Call him Jacob. It seems he’d wrestled with angels, though his wound was more severe than his namesake’s, and he felt anything but blessed. Since we rarely recognize godsends when they come to us, that wasn’t surprising.

When I visited with him, he told me, “I am alone. There is no one in my life for whom I am special.”

That reminded me of a fellow chaplain’s tale. She had visited a dying woman, listened to her despair. “I can’t die,” the woman told her. “Not until there is someone for whom I am life.”

We all desire that deep and intimate love. My mother, too, never ceased her longing for that special relationship. After she divorced my father, she had a few boyfriends. Some asked her to marry them. Nothing lasted, though. In the months before she died, when her dementia emptied her of inhibition, she sought lovers in every man she met, hoping that for one of them, she would be the world.

No Cinderellas

Perhaps that love came to her, in a way. During her last week of life, she started talking about childhood friends and family. There was one she’d been fond of, a second or third cousin. Once, while they’d drifted on the lake in a boat, he kissed her. Not long afterwards, he died.

Now, he was back, appearing to her in insubstantial form, but still there. She wanted to know if he was waiting for her. Is that what happens when we die, friends come to meet us? Perhaps because I am a minister, my atheist mom thought I could answer her questions. It’s funny what people think a minister knows.

Maybe that’s why my colleague’s patient pleaded with her for a reprieve, as if she thought the chaplain could intercede for her with God. As children, we often that we know nothing, that we are of little consequence to the world. Surely a chaplain is more important than we, more able to convince God to listen. Could the chaplain not pray for more time? If she had a few months, a year, perhaps love would find her. It was as if, after a lifetime of loneliness, she could waltz into her own fairy tale.

The young man with the stroke had no such delusions. His wife had divorced him. Now, he felt bereft, for he’d never find anyone to love a cripple like him. It wasn’t a very kind description he gave himself, but the point was, he had no faith in his capacity to heal. I’m not talking of physical healing here, but a healing of the soul. He was convinced he was not good enough. There would be no Cinderella for him now.

Only the Weak Need God

His family assumed he was being punished by God because he’d done some evil thing. They didn’t know what it was. They could not point to any particular deed. Like Job’s friends, however, they insisted that Jacob consider his past, think of every misstep, every inconsiderate action. Then he could apologize and beg God’s forgiveness.

Jacob had no patience with that. Not that he thought, as Job did, that there was no wrong in him. Instead, he didn’t believe in God at all.

“Only weak people believe in God,” he told me.

If God didn’t exist, then he wasn’t being punished. Yet here he was, abandoned by his wife, cut down by illness. That certainly felt like punishment to him. He had lost all hope of reconciliation and restoration. If this despair he felt wasn’t weakness, what was it? Maybe, like those proverbial men in foxholes, he would begin to pray.

Choosing to Be Happy

As a chaplain, I hear many stories. Sometimes I’m amazed at how much sadness one life can hold. At others times, I’m awed by the unlimited stream of love a person has known. Yet I’ve noticed that happiness is not dependent on hardship or the lack thereof.

One patient I visited recounted some of the trials she’d been through. After her father abandoned her, she ended up in foster care, with all the misery that can entail. Her first marriage was abusive. When she was nine, because of a limb deformity, she ended up spending months in a body cast.

Throughout her life, she stayed happy. She gave credit for that to God. Apparently, while she was incapacitated, God spoke to her, saying “You are going to have a difficult life. You have a choice. Either you can blame me and be bitter and miserable, or you can love me and be happy.”

She said she decided to be happy. In spite of physical challenges, of loves lost, of hardship, she has felt close to God. In that closeness, she has known joy. To hear her tell it, we have the capacity to choose how we respond to our lot in life, regardless of whether we are alone or in relationship.

The type of hardship we experience surely makes a difference, and maybe traumas don’t affect us as much if we receive help grieving and processing our hurts. That wouldn’t surprise me. If we’re appreciated and nurtured as a child, we can rise above tragedies that drown others. A person surrounded by supportive community can better heal his trauma. It could be that the young stroke victim, the dying woman, my mother never felt accepted, never knew unconditional regard, never received the nurturing of a compassionate community.

To Lose Our Love

Even if this were true, it need not condemn them to misery. We are eminently capable of change. Resilience may be complicated, for it requires a mix of inner traits and outer learning, but it is possible for us all. Joy has little to do with the particulars of our lives, and much to do with how we interpret our world.

At the same, love is vital. We all need to feel that someone cares about us, us in particular. God’s love is good, but if the stories we hear are true, God feels the same love for everyone else that God feels for us. Most of us want to know we are special to at least one other person.

Of course, feeling a special love can be precarious. There are risks to opening our hearts. For instance, 30 to 90 percent of widows and widowers follow their spouses into death within the first six months. This is true especially in the elderly, for a big shock can overwhelm a frail body, and the aged widow or widower may not just refuse to thrive. She may have a heart attack. We really can die from a broken heart. [1]

An Unfulfilled Longing

Even if we live on after a loss, however, life’s brilliance may fade. One of our recovery church members lost his wife to cancer. Now, he finds, living is not as important to him as it once was. Not that he looks forward to dying. Rather, if his body failed, it would be all right. Death seems less ominous, perhaps.

Some of us actively seek oblivion after a loss. A friend of mine, whose husband died, chose to take her own life after only a few lonely months. She was in her thirties, so strong enough to survive and build a new life, but her spirit was not strong. She’d tried before to die by suicide. In the past, however, she’d reached out for help in living. This time, she did not. Grief can kill us one way or another.

Yet what if we never had a special person in our life? For many of us, that leads to loneliness. How do we cope with those empty feelings? Especially when our own death looms, and we begin to look back on what we have, or have not, accomplished, how do we reconcile ourselves to a longing unfulfilled?

Making a Choice

Since I’ve been married for 36 years to a man I met when I was 18, I can’t answer that question from personal experience, so I look to the stories of others to figure it out.

For instance, there was Helen, one of my mother’s friends. She had divorced after only a few years of marriage and never had another serious relationship. When I was an adolescent and not feeling particularly joyful, I asked if she was happy, less because she was unmarried as because, at the time, I wondered what happiness was and how a person found it.

She said she didn’t try to be happy, because happiness came and went. I could understand that. Instead of focusing on happiness, she said, she focused on being content, and content, she was. She had work she enjoyed well enough, an apartment, friends. In the evenings, she might take in a show or go out to eat. She enjoyed living alone. Not everyone needs a partner, nor wants one.

To Give Rather than Receive

So perhaps it’s less that we need someone to spend a life with, someone for whom we are special, and more that we need to discover something that makes life worth living. That can be a marriage, parenting, a calling, a relationship with the holy. All of us are born with the capacity to long for something outside of ourselves, to reach for something to fill us. We get to choose what that is.

Do we yearn for pleasure, good fortune, success, fame? Most of us want to be special in some way. What is our way? Who do we want to be when we grow up, when we age, when we leave our legacy? What do we wish to accomplish? Who do we long to love?

I suspect this last question is the most important. Jacob, with his bitterness, didn’t desire to love someone as much as he wanted to be loved. The woman my colleague met with wished she had one significant person in her life who knew her and saw her for whom she really was. It seemed she longed more for what she might receive more than for what she might give. My mother, in her way, was loving and generous. She was also self-centered enough that she couldn’t read others very well. Her attempts at kindness went askew or fell flat.

If we desire a special love that lasts a lifetime, whether that be six months or sixty years, perhaps the most important thing we can do is pay attention, care about the other person, think more about offering love than about getting it.

What Does Liberty Mean?

Of course, relationships last for many reasons, some of which have nothing to do with affection. Maybe one of the partners is so self-sacrificing, he will take any amount of abuse without complaining. From the outside, this may look like love, but it’s not. When power is so out of balance that boundaries are ignored, respect shattered, kindness ridiculed, and pain ever present, what we call love is but a shadow that conceals the desperation, shame, and hopelessness that fester within.

Jamelle Bouie, in a New York Times opinion column, quotes from Abraham Lincoln’s speech in Baltimore while Congress was approving the 13^th Amendment. In his speech, Lincoln explained that we all like liberty, but liberty doesn’t mean the same thing to each of us. Indeed, “the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor, while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” [2]

In other words, some of us think that no one is free unless all of us are free, while others think that they are free only if they have can control those who are “beneath” them. In the United States, white people have the right to enforce such a definition of freedom, though men may take that right over women, and parents over their children, and owners over their employees. Generally, however, as Bouie points out, the more white a person is, the more freedom she can enjoy. The prime example, of course, is that before the Civil War, slaveholders claimed that their freedom depended on their right to own the bodies and labor of blacks.

Freedom for What?

Bouie acknowledges that much has changed since then, but not everything. We’re still arguing that basic question of who is free and who is not. We disagree about what freedom is for. Do we want to do something “for ourselves” or “to others”? [3]

Clearly, this is about racism. Yet this dynamic underlies many of the political struggles of our day, such as mask-wearing, abortion, and voting. Additionally, it is basic to our private relationships.

On the face of it, comparing personal affairs to a fight over slavery may seem extreme, but we humans confuse love with ownership all the time. Partly that’s because we evolved to get a thrill out of being on top and in charge. We get an endorphin rush when we win. That’s one unfortunate aspect of having bodies that evolved to survive. Out in the wild, we can’t always be nice. If we don’t kill the leopard first, she might kill us.

The same energy and ruthlessness that make us good at surviving also make us good at abusing, manipulating, and dominating our fellow humans. At the same time, we’re masters of rationalization. We can twist reality into knots that obscure what’s really there. Thus, we blame, not ourselves, but our victim. In the end, even sociopaths want to think they’re the good guys, the ones who have it right, and they’ll do whatever they must in order to talk themselves into believing it. So will we.

Though helpful for our physical survival, this is a lousy way to sustain relationships, and it’s no way to express love. If we want love in our lives, we can’t fool ourselves into thinking we have the right to control our partners. We can’t pretend it’s okay to dominate them.

If We Want Love

So if we want to receive a free and mature love, one that is caring, open, and nurturing, we must first seek to behave in a loving manner. That doesn’t mean we will never judge, never have unrealistic expectations, never be petty or be unkind, never get jealous or try to control our partners. It means that when we do these things, we will stop and notice. We will recognize the hurt we have done and care enough to look inside ourselves to see what caused us to behave that way, because only by looking deeply at who we are, can we change.

Obviously these small, or even large, wounds aren’t as terrible as those caused by slavery, but they keep us from being free. Whether we are the abuser or the abused, such acts force us to live constrained by fear. They keep us trapped in our own pain. Abuse may be mild, though even subtle abuse can be insidious, as when we ignore others and discount their needs, but when we’ve grown up in dysfunctional homes where tyrants ruled, we get confused and think that love and cruelty are the same thing. They are not.

If we want love, we must figure this out. We must look at the log in our own eye. What do we long for, and what does that say about us? Will we yield power to sustain affection, or deny affection to maintain control? Do we dare look deeply at ourselves and listen compassionately to others, or do we fear what we might discover if we see what is really there?

Spreading Love

Whether we are young or old, at the beginning or at the end of our lives, we long for love. We evolved for it. After all, without that desire to bond, our species could not continue. Not only would we not have babies, but we wouldn’t care for them after they were born.

So love, and the capacity to love, is part of our nature. If we want to enjoy a life-affirming, equitable, and enriching partnership, if we want to have someone in our lives for whom we are special, we need to learn to be kind and open, to care about others. We need to learn not just to seek love, but also to spread it.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

1. UHBlog, “The Widowhood Effect: Is it Real of a Myth?,” Healthy-at-UH, May 16, 2018, https://www.uhhospitals.org/Healthy-at-UH/articles/2018/05/the-widowhood-effect, accessed December 18, 2021.
2. Bouie, Jamelle, “What Does ‘White Freedom’ Really Mean?,” The New York Times, December 18, 2021, A20.
3. Ibid.

Photo by Visual Stories || Micheile on Unsplash

Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.