Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. ~Rainer Maria Rilke
True love does not come by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
~Jason Jordan
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Love is a tricky thing isn’t it? It’s the one feeling that can take us to great heights and make us breathless looking down on the world. It gives us great sight to see things of such beauty and it very nearly gives us wings to fly… But “love” is also the most elusive of emotions, and actions. Not unlike the white unicorns of fairy tales or the virgins who by those fairy tales are the only ones who can approach them, love is just as rarely seen… true love that is :P
But what about reality love?
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that love is the master chameleon cleverly disguising itself in various forms and just when you think you’ve spotted it, like smoke that gets whisked away in the breeze, it’s gone. When I was young I thought of love as the most powerful emotion. I still see it at that but I know that the emotion is not just the sensation of pleasant numbness. I know that the emotion truly known as love can sometimes be the voice of concession which is much more real than the dream vision of my youth. I think that true love has its roots in reality where two people make concessions because they BELIEVE that the purpose of such is a mutual sharing of life, joy, ups and downs. I think the overwhelming “Feel” of love as thought of in my youth is more the fantasy that we’re fed. Or maybe I’m just turning into a cynic.
It’s kind of like faith. Faith isn’t a “feeling”. It’s action, purpose, etc. It’s the same with love; except love is a feeling too. It wears many hats you see and is the master of disguise.
Why do I ramble so?
Because I cannot for the life of me understand people who think they feel love both in the fantasy and the reality sense and do NOTHING about it. You see it in the movies all the time, except this isn’t Hollywood. Everyday we look for something to awaken us, to give us life, to infuse our very breath with purpose and awareness. And for some, it’s right in front of their faces… yet they choose to do nothing. In the movies this is seen as the person running after a moving airplane after they realize what’s important in their life is the person who is leaving it.
I also believe love can be felt with more than just one person, but that you should choose only one person to love. For those who have been lucky enough to know love in the face of two people, the hardest thing for you is the choice. But the choice should be made. Love should not be offered to more than one, because in doing so you split your heart.
I think about love a lot. As someone who lacks it in their life (from a partner) I find it on my mind quite a bit. I see all these people out there who talk about how they can’t possibly be the only romantic out there. Well you’re not. I see all these other people who say they want love, who say they NEED love and do nothing to attain it. I see all these people who refuse to choose, instead choosing to feel the pain of indifference. I see all these people who say they love, but they don’t, they lie to themselves because they love the idea of being in love or what it represents.
All I’m looking for is someone who wants it as bad as I do. Someone who is willing to make concessions a bit, willing to accommodate a change in space, willing to open their heart, and definitely most definitely willing to take the risk that the very nature of the word LOVE implies. That’s not too much to ask is it? But maybe it is. These are just my thoughts today, on love. They are subject to change, and hopefully subject to a relationship at some point in my life… at which time these rambling thoughts will stop :P
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WELL WISHES
I wish today that you all find it easy to smile to a stranger, make eye contact with another and reach out to someone you don’t know with a kind word, gesture, etc. May these things you do bring a smile to others, as well as to you. I wish you all well in your endeavors today, and I wish you the warmth of peacefulness. You are being thought of, and most definitely in some way or form, you are loved.
*****
AND REMEMBER:
“Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes... just be an illusion.” ~Javan
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Added after the original posting. This is a *MUST* read.
Posted by Zee in comments on Cancer, Baby’s blog. If ever there was a testament to love, it is this…
Posted by: zee May 15, 2006 at 02:27 PM
I posted on the topic, because I wanted you to go back to her post on her last anniversary, I wanted Jessica's husband to see how much she loved him, but I am not sure you will see it is from a different post. So here it is.
In Sickness and in Health
(Cancer baby wrote this in June 05)
This week, my husband and I will celebrate our third anniversary.
Ours was a lengthy courtship. We met when I was twenty but didn't marry until I was twenty-nine, and although our wedding took a long time in coming, we knew fairly early on that our relationship fit the category of "keeper."
We were introduced just two months before I left college. I was on the cusp of graduating and returning to my hometown for the six month period between finishing my Bachelor's degree and beginning graduate school, so our quick friendship barely had time to blossom into romance before I found myself on a plane, winging my way towards my parents' house, which stood thousands of miles away from my new boyfriend.
But I knew a good thing when I saw it, and so despite the nascence of our relationship, I refused to let space and circumstance take their toll. Over the course of the next half year, we essentially began our life together, albeit at a distance, and our feelings for one another grew primarily through letter writing. Indeed, at a time when email had recently become king, we courted in a more old-fashioned way, exchanging missives in a postmodern, post-collegiate epistolary romance.
As the summer approached, I invited him to spend time with me in my hometown, and he accepted. We spent the season falling in love -- discovering each other physically, emotionally, intellectually. And for all intents and purposes, after the summer came to a close and I shipped off to graduate school, we were never apart again.
Eight years, two cities, and multiple living arrangements later, we wed in a beautiful outdoor ceremony surrounded by family and friends. Although we wrote much of the service ourselves, we used traditional vows to seal our bond: For better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.
On our first anniversary, we had recently moved into our house. It was the house in which I had anticipated raising our children, the first of whom we had just started trying to conceive. While at the time I didn't know it, a week prior I experienced the initial symptoms of my disease -- symptoms that quickly disappeared and didn't show up again for two months, symptoms I never gave a second thought to when we went away for the weekend to celebrate.
Our second anniversary coincided with my last day of first-line chemotherapy. I was in remission, and with a decent prognosis I had begun dreaming about adoption. That weekend, we again celebrated by going out of town. To mark the end of my treatment, we placed a moratorium on cancer talk, and we spoke instead about our forthcoming family, choosing a name for the daughter we anticipated parenting together in the near future.
This year, our anniversary finds my illness recently recurred, my second-line chemotherapy at its outset, and our plans for a family sidelined, probably forever. This time, we will stay close to home, and there will be no talk of children. There will, however, probably be talk of cancer.
Our cancer conversations, of course, are familiar now. They have taken place in locations and at times I'd never before thought possible, seeping into even the most mundane of moments, and the most pedestrian utterances of our daily vernacular. We've discussed cancer -- ovarian cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, uterine cancer, colon cancer, testicular cancer -- nearly everywhere: walking the dog, doing the dishes, lying in bed, driving the car, on a plane, at the gas station, buying furniture, at an amusement park, playing Scrabble. Our conversations run the gamut of possible disease-related topics, covering the emotional whirligigs of our fear, grief, and hope, and also the deliberate, technical, sterile facts of my prognosis; the statistics, the case histories, the various treatment options.
As it turns out, for me those treatment options are far more plentiful than most women with ovarian cancer. That reality has little to do with the efforts of my oncologists, or my youthful age and otherwise strong body. Instead, it has everything to do with my husband, because even since the earliest days of my initial diagnosis he has been researching ovarian cancer at an astonishing pace. With only an Arts and Humanities degree to his name, he has transformed himself into a veritable scientist, reading biology and chemistry books, visiting medical libraries and combing online resources, befriending and consulting key cancer investigators and oncologists, and gate-crashing the physician- and members-only gatherings of major cancer research centers and associations. That he goes undetected as a lay-person at these meetings is a testament to his considerable knowledge, as is the fact that most physicians and researchers who meet him believe he is a doctor or Ph.D unless he is given occasion to inform them otherwise.
His pursuits have made a concrete difference in my care, and they have far-reaching ramifications beyond mere intellectual stimulation. For example, he has, despite my medical and gynecologic oncologists' occasionally dismissive words, ordered a panoply of tests on my tumor -- tests that have revealed potentially treatable, possibly curable or manageable mutations that might be driving my disease. And he has doggedly located, through his research contacts and his own investigative grit, multiple clinical trials about which most oncologists are unaware, but that may become very important to my survival.
So more than anything, it is my husband, not my doctors, who will make it possible for me to pursue more and better treatments than what constitute the typical recurrent ovarian cancer fare, in which women are placed on a merry-go-round of one failing chemotherapy after another by well-meaning but overworked, often jaded, and fatally fearful oncologists. But because of my husband, there is a battery of potentially life-saving, and certainly life-prolonging, treatment options available to me.
His efforts on my behalf elicit mixed feelings in me. Of course they are an enormous source of pride and gratitude, and they speak volumes to the strength of both his character and the capacity of his love. But sometimes, they make me worry. They make me worry for his health, both emotional and physical, and I see the strains wrought by the burden of knowledge that he bears. I see it in the nearly thirty pounds he's lost during the two months since my recurrence, in the insomnia he experiences most nights, in the stomach aches he's begun to suffer almost daily. I see it when he's feeling desperate as he dashes to the bathroom, retching from and overcome by anxiety, physically spent but still straining to comfort me through his fear, anger, and sadness, as well as the glimpses he sees into the life he may some day have to rebuild.
But none of these worries compares to the worry I feel when I think about what might happen to him if his Herculean effort to keep me alive fails. This anxiety hasn't manifested itself because his love for me is somehow greater than any other devoted husband's or caregiver's. Rather, it festers because I worry about where his mind and the self-doubt, guilt, and need to find someone to blame so common to the human experience of grief will take him. When my anxiety is at its worst, I wonder what will happen to him if I die. I wonder -- after he closes the door on the last visitor to my funeral, after he puts away his biology books and removes the links to his oncology pages from the computer, after he tells his research comrades in arms that my journey is over -- if he will begin to believe he didn't do enough. On the nights that I, too, cannot sleep, I peer secretly at him through the study door as he researches into the wee hours, and I am gripped by a dread that ponders whether, upon my death, he will, even for a second, curse his inability to save me -- that he will struggle to find a source to blame and somehow find only himself.
To ward off that fear, I try to focus less on the uncertainties that the future may hold and more on the small, fragile joys of the present -- this present, our present, so fraught as it is with terror and pain. I do my best to concentrate on the brief intervals, sometimes measured in seconds, sometimes measured in minutes, when the cognizance of my disease disappears from my mind. These moments emerge when we talk about music, or read books to each other just before going to bed, materializing as we laugh about the way our dog sneezes when he greets us, or when we compare paint samples at the hardware store. They arrive suddenly but silently when we trade silly emails, or tease each other over some of our more harmless but endearing foibles. They awaken through the gentle but dynamic brush of a delicate touch to the arm, or the serene but palpable vibrations flashing in a crooked smile.
Of course, there is also some comfort for me in the fact that a year and a half after my initial diagnosis, and on the occasion of our third anniversary, the picture I have of my husband wracked with guilt over what he could not prevent thankfully remains in my imagination. It is an agonizing projection, but a projection nonetheless. So although he may one day wonder if he could have done more to save me, for now -- as he thinks alongside the expert researchers about anti-angiogenesis and NFKappaB blockers, and considers with the oncologist authorities growth factor receptor inhibitors and tyrosine kinase signalling pathways -- he can mostly believe with faith that the work he is doing now will, ultimately, be the most important work of his, and of our, lifetime.
To me, whether or not that's true is in most ways beside the point, even if he had never opened a biology textbook, or had given up researching in despair and frustration many months ago. Even if I had never recurred. Even if I had never gotten sick at all. Because what I want him to know as he pores over his medical journals, emailing questions and treatment strategies to researchers, doctors, and cancer patients across the country, is that when he wonders if he can save me -- fervently, desperately, anxiously, hopefully -- the answer is that he already has.
1 comment:
Thank you so much for posting this and for sharing your own thoughts as well...beautiful and wise...I will visit often.
Jules
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