“be of love (a little) more careful than of everything”. e.e. Cummings.
Most of us know someone or know someone who knows someone who died during Covid. We are now more alert to the closeness of death than maybe we were even two years ago. Nonetheless, I am taken back when someone I know and love dies, as happened just a couple of weeks ago.
My sister in Dublin, Ireland sent me the death notice. My first real love, who still decades later holds a very special place, as is usual with first loves, had died. In his case it was a six-year ordeal with cancer. Remember cancer! Still lurking around not willing to be completely out-paced by Covid. I was sad. The world without John seems like a lesser place. His ascorbic wit, his sharp mind, his unrelenting perceptions, his very dry and funny Irish humor, his great talent as a writer and editor, were so formative in my younger life.
He was not my first serious boyfriend but was my first true love. He came from a huge Irish Catholic family, the eldest of nine, his family were dairy farmers, and his bevvy of younger brothers and sisters who thought he was utterly exotic for living in the big city of Dublin and going to ‘the university’, and the protestant university to boot, which may have been akin to living in a foreign and dangerous country. As for me, I was beyond what they had encountered. I really was foreign, had an accent and came from a place that they prob could not locate on a map. I had a car, my own car with which I drove us both down to the country, him to visit his family, me to meet them. They were lovely in the way of Irish people who encounter an entity that they have no reason to be overly suspicious of. They asked good and polite questions. We sat in the good room, the one used on Sundays. We had tea, the kids trying hard not to stare, but failing as they peered and shyly giggled.
John and I were sweethearts for a few tumultuous years when we were both students together, he studying English and I psychology. What struck me most when I heard of his death was this crushing regret that I had never told him what a gift he had bestowed on me, both by who he was and how he loved me. I had not been loved before in this way. They all say it, the experts who write of such things, they say that most regrets are about what we haven’t done and much less often about what we have done. I had never told him. Always assuming that there would be time and the right context.
Decades and continents separated us, as we each married different partners, had careers, children, went off on our own very divergent tracks. I left Ireland, shortly after university, and went to live in India after a stint in an art college in London, while he stayed and embedded himself into the richness of place and belonging. On my few return journeys, he would take great delight in tormenting me for my having wandered into the guru lane, for having changed my name, having lived in India and having fallen so head long into a way of being that was ‘devotional’, as he had spent his adult years weaning any semblance of the Catholic church from his psychic field. He found it incomprehensible that I would fall headlong into a disciple role. He enjoyed administering a good roasting and being Irish he was uncommonly good at it. The Irish can sear you with such humor that the inevitable laughter takes some of the sting from the lashing, till the laughter fades but the sting lingers.
His vast connected family belonged to each other and to the land they tended, while I had come from a family who neither belonged to each other or to any place. My family were strangers in a strange land and it must be said that when we got off the boat in Ireland, I as a 12-year-old, I could not for the life of me understand a word of what was spoken, even though it was indeed English, but with an accent that my ears had no habit for. They in turn could not understand me either. I might as well have landed in middle Africa, where at least I would have been warm, rather than continually and perpetually cold in dark, damp Ireland. I could say however, despite a sense of displacement, in those dreary winter days walking home from school, that the smell of the peat bog burning from hundreds of fireplaces sent me into a dizzy spell of unsummoned and unexpected happiness, watching as the spirals of smoke lifted up into the foggy leaden skies.
We shared some of the most intense times, friendship, discoveries, loving, betrayals, infidelities, our first dive into the otherworldiness of psychedelic drugs, and heartbreaks. Being young, oh so young, newly freed from parental oversight, students in Trinity College, Dublin in the late ‘60s, those were the best of times and the worst of times, but I did love him and he me.
Immaturity eventually drove us apart (mine in particular) since I had no understanding how rare it was to find a depth affinity with another. I was much too restless to settle at that stage of life and assumed that what we had could and would be found again, and again. I went off blithely, not realizing that what we had was a thing of great beauty. His love had saved me, not physically but by effortlessly and naturally showing me by example what it was to care for another human, to let them know that they matter, to make them central and not be ashamed to show it.
I never told him any of this as I’m telling you now. When my father died at the young age of 70, the same guru whom John so teased me for following, told me that one should always be current, should not leave anything important undone, unsaid, unacknowledged. I was a mere thirty when I heard those words, directed at me, and I did not comprehend. Now it makes more sense, because now, I see and feel how much closer to midnight I am on the clock of my own life. I feel how much closer humanity may be to the midnights of our collective lives, and now that message of not leaving the important unsaid is finally sinking in.
I have written two books of poetry but not even one poem is directly about love. It’s a subject that I am uncomfortable with. Much like the word ‘energy’ which we throw about as if its meaning is understood and agreed upon. Yet ask even those in the sciences and see how hard it is to define, describe or quantify, yet we somehow know it as life itself and talk of it as if we are on intimate terms. So too with love. It’s the very ground we need to live well, the very ground we stand on and lean into, yet speaking of it is uncomfortable for me for it can’t easily be described, means so many different things to different people and seems so difficult to live. There are so many different flavors and so many ways in which our needs get manipulated in pursuit of it. It is not that I don’t trust love, or know love, but rather, that I do not always trust humans with its power, its true value or with our capacity to differentiate love from sentimentality, love from need, love from hormones or security. There are too many Hallmark cards and not enough-truth telling, or as one of my favorite poems on the subject by Adrienne Rich says….
“An honorable human relationship is a process-
Delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved.
A process of refining the truths they tell one another.
It is important to do this.
It breaks down self-delusion and isolation and does
Justice to own complexity
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people
To go that hard way with us”.
It’s has been easier for me to speak the shadow than the light, whatever that shadow may be. We assume the shadow is some dark sinister aspect of ourselves that has to be hidden since it’s surely unacceptable and maybe even reprehensible. This is not always the case. What is in the shadow is only that part of ourselves we can’t see, don’t know or keep hidden for whatever reason. Many hide our light in the shadow, or equally sad, our love.
A dear friend who is an excellent Jungian therapist, turned out to my perfect counter point. We were the pair, two sides of the same coin. She saw and reflected the light, love and the goodness within her clients, just as deftly as I could see the blind spots and tripping points. Together we were whole in our capacity to perceive. Her job over the decades was to learn the language of psycho-pathology, just as mine was to trust the kindness and goodness that was also part of the presenting package.
Awkward as it is for me to write, I’m suggesting that we not be too cautious in communicating our love and our appreciation, that we not wait for the perfect time. That we take the courage and the time to acknowledge the ones who extend a hand, or take ours, the ones who nourish us, hug us, sees us, hold us, love us. No matter how we live, if we live, we will know loss, we will know heartbreak and ache, we must learn to allow ourselves to need, to lean into and on one another, just as centrally as we have to learn how to stand apart and on our own. It’s a great old paradox that continues and stays ever true.
It’s the hard work of love that tells the truth, that peels away sentiment from presence, that pares back convenience from choice. It is the season to unapologetically bring the light of our loving out of the shadows and let it lead, let it illuminate the dark days of winter. I never told John the depth of the positive impact he had on my life, but I am now more apt to tell my beloved, my friends and you my readers, whoever you are, and I do not always know who you are, that I am grateful that these words reach you, and may even move the needle of your day, though I do not pretend to know which way, or how.
May your solstice and the turning back into the longer days, moving towards spring bring a willingness to speak your love and your deepest appreciation for all is important and true for you.
Udi
Zada
Solstice
