A thing for fools

A thing for fools, this,

Love,

But a holy thing,

To love what death can touch.

Judah Halevi wrote these word--he was a doctor and a poet who was born in Spain in 1075. He died in Israel, in 1141.

I wake and feel

the deep wracking cough of my child

before I am woke and my own bones,

aching and riddled with cancer (how much? and how much is too much?),

drag me from my bed to get the

thick, syrupy elixir to him

before he realizes there is a whole night out here,

with the possibility of television,

tucked in snug, next to me.

I wrote those words last night and friends, of late, it has been a darker time for me, where loving feels like grieving too much. It might be the edge of winter pressing in.

Zoe and I walked yesterday in the bog, which was gray and dreary. The wind bit us, and then two gorgeous, wildly groomed standard poodles were suddenly leaping at us with joy, but they were too much, and scratched my cold hand in their hello, and I was angry at the woman walking them off leash, scolding them but not looking up to acknowledge us. I was a little child again, resentful, nursing my hand, almost wishing it would bleed so I would have visual grounds for complaint.

Zoe and I talked about marriage on our walk, and when we got home, we were just that side of too cold, and I retreated to my bed for a restless nap. How do you make that bet that the person you choose to marry will change as you change? so you keep meeting in love, day in and day out? she asked. I was proud that she recognizes the gamble of lifelong commitment, and then chagrined at my pride. How steeped in realism do we all have to be over here?

Asher and Elijah love a girl named Sloane. Keep in mind this is kindergarten. Two mornings ago, Elijah announced he was going to bring a piece of gum to school for Sloane. I gave him a plastic bag in which to transport the gift. I'm going to bring a piece of gum to Sloane, announced Asher. I gave him a bag to transport the gift, and gulped a bit thinking of the future--various Sloanes spinning out there, waiting to divide the boys from one another. Asher went on to draw a picture for Sloane. There was Asher, there was Sloane, and then he thought he would add a meteor. Sloane won't like that, said Elijah. Sloane will be afraid the meteor will hurt her. Asher was genuinely worried, paused, with his crayon in hand, bowl of cereal getting mushier by the minute. I know, he finally said, with real relief. I will add a force field. Whew, problem solved.

Asher triumphantly came off the bus at the end of the day, holding a chewed up piece of gum. Sloane had accepted the gift, chewed the gum, and then gave it back to Asher when she was done. Being a real five-year-old girl from enlightened Carlisle, Asher's teacher also let me know (on an unrelated call that afternoon) that upon hearing Asher tell Sloane that she was his girlfriend, Sloane had emphatically told him she was not.

It is a holy thing to love what grief can touch. The poem by Halevi suggests that to love is necessarily to grieve, and so, of late, it seems to me that I have been trying to understand grieving. I grieve now for things which might be premature to grieve--but it levels me, and I think I finally understand what that phrase truly means, to contemplate not being here when my children's children are born. I think I would be a great grandmother--as you know, my parenting philosophy has been one of essentially benign neglect (I come from a long line of such mothers--heavy on love, and light on rules, because how else can one balance working and mothering and reading and being in love, and so forth), and I had imagined that approach would be terrifically useful in those early days of having a newborn (give me the baby, go take a nap), and the idea of missing out on that leaves me gasping for air at times, I weep so hard.

But perhaps I am grieving prematurely as I said--right now there may be a graduate student, adding and re-adding a column of numbers, glowing with excitement at the prospect of tenure, who is about to announce the cure for lung cancer (okay, I know, it's a start-up lab in Cambridge and any glow is about having stock in hand when the company goes public), or, more likely, perhaps one of my kids is about to ring me to let me know I am about to be a grandmother. I can't really make the joke though; it seems tremendously unfair to miss that part of my life, and again, I feel like stamping on the ground and throwing my anger around the room like a child.

The poem of course is much deeper. It's about love, which is predicated on loss. We are destined to lose all that we love. And yet we persist. We are five and we are in love with the tallest five-year-old girl in the kindergarten. I am seemingly now on the short end of good-bye, and yet I have never felt so in love and never felt so loved. I'm making new friends, for god's sake. What's wrong with you people? Why are you drawn to someone with stage four lung cancer? Why would you not nod politely and move the hell on? It's a real question.

To keep our love holy, we must become versed in grief. The child in me asks why isn't the love enough to keep me in this world, to let me keep loving in this world, to allow me to be here to receive love. But it isn't a war of love against grief. Perhaps love is transcendent, even holy, because we dare to love, knowing what we know of grief. And then, knowing what we know of grief, to again turn to love again, strikes me as not foolhardy but profoundly courageous.

In our house, we find the love story of Sloan and Asher and Elijah sad and sweet and funny. Profoundly immature, and doomed to failure. Not a one of us believes that any of these three will grow up to marry one another. Certainly none of the five-year olds is ready to take a bet on the other as someone who is capable of living with them throughout their inevitable changes, which Zoe posits as essential to marriage. But we love that the boys already wonder about love, already love us and already imagine a future with a kind of grown-up love in it. I rail against the cancer that threatens to take me out of sight before I am ready to be gone, but the love keeps me whole, keeps me from falling apart, has me lea[ing out of bed to help my child with a cough despite the hurt in my bones.

There's a meteor coming, so add a force field.