A Great Love Does Not Always Bring Flowers

Great loves do not always bring flowers or frilly cards on Valentine's Day. There is not always an intimate dinner with wine and chocolate. Perhaps they do not notice your birthday, or Mother's Day, or remember that they already gave you a socket wrench kit last Christmas. But they love, my friends, from deep within their souls. In all their broken glory, they will be known as joy.

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I have been blessed with a great love.

How is that possible? my critics demand. You divorced for over thirty years ago, and you have been alone ever since.

Perhaps, they say, you mean the love of your pets? That is nice, but that is hardly a great love. 

Ah! But do you see the photo, here on this page? That is the full moon, shining over the hotel parking lot in St. John's. He was there for chemo treatments, when his cancer came back. I was his medical escort, and we stood in the parking lot and saw that moon. It occurred to me then that love really is forever.

But he was mean to you, they remind me. He hurt you, and you cried. Oh! And he was not always faithful, remember. (spoken in tones of prim smugness, those last lines)

Yes, I affirm. That is all true. It is also true that, frightened child with unpatched cuts and burns, he sat on the neighbours' steps alone while his house with his mother and five siblings died inside, and he a helpless child could only wait and hope while no one came to comfort him until his grandparents took him home.

Did you know he dreamed dreams, had hopes as you do, had a heart filled with love to give as you do? Did you know that, out of the twisted remnants of a childhood torn from him, from the very depths of all his brokenness, his love clawed its way into the light to find its way as best it could?

And from the margins, that love encompassed me, and yes it became destructive, but, like I said in my book, the one that failed to provide bannock references and ceremonies to your profound prestiged inclusiveness, Love means you stand by someone, even if you have to go away. 

And verily, the dazzling attraction of youth became, in the last days, a companionship, a standing together, as he faced his mortality. It became the love it was called to be.

Miles and lifetimes apart, we were refuge to each other. As his family gathered to say good-bye with him there, I gathered the talismans and artifacts of our journey to watch with him from afar.

A great love is not always kind. It is not always noble. Sometimes it is a raw and seeping, often hideous wonder, a loyalty and marvel ripped from the darkest recesses of a broken and tormented soul. And often, it must be lived in distance, with time and grace soften its edges and make it bearable.

And so, my friends, I slide down in the face of my own mortality and I know, and therefore celebrate, that I have been blessed with a great love. And in it, I am complete.