The last afternoon before spring vacation, an assembly at the middle school where I work made me cry. Technically, the assembly was full
of announcements and reminders about cleaning out their lockers before going on
vacation, about not texting at school, and about the upcoming construction
project at the school which will require patience, obedience, and flexibility
on everyone’s part.
If it were just announcements, I wouldn’t have found myself
tearing up. All of this information was presented in a series of short funny
videos that teachers had made. The final one was a music video of various
teachers lip-synching to Wilson Phillips “Hold on For One More Day.” It was absurd and beautiful and filled with the joy that these teachers find and make among their students.
We rarely see the love that holds the world together, that
shapes our lives. Those hundred seventh and eighth graders have no concept of
how dearly their teachers love them, what joy they have in teaching them. And it is too heavy and strange a thing to
place on students to say: “we are here for you, we are rooting for you, we love
how and who you are now, and how and who you will be later.” You can’t say that
in a way they will understand. But you can take a few hours and create a video
and make them laugh and feel safe. And that is something the same as love.
A week or so after that middle school assembly, I was in the
hospital, visiting my dad. With the fresh recognition that most actions worth
noting are an articulation and permutation of love, I began to see the tubes of
medicine and oxygen pumping into his ailing self as some medical
transmogrification of love. What the flowers on the windowsill said was love,
the pictures on the wall, the cards, the strangeness of his own prayers over
each course of drugs, the nervous, hopeful footsteps of his visiting friends, his ability to still make jokes with his daughters, his own need for my mom to hold his hand until he slept and to write down all his plans
for their house—all of it was love being poured into different shapes and
containers.
Lately, my favorite line from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is when Emily revisits her twelfth birthday and,
with the poetic clarity of a dead character, can see the amorphous, omnipresent
love imbued in every mundane word and gesture and action on an ordinary
morning. “So,” she sobs, “all of that was going on and we never noticed…”
It’s hard to notice, all the time. And, much as I might hope
otherwise, I know that love is so deeply buried under all sorts of other harder emotions and motivations that we need mining gear and scuba suits to find it.
But I believe love is there, is always there, and going on all the time if only
we can believe it.
I think of love much like I think of the limited, shifting,
innumerable molecules of known elements in this world. Matter is neither
created nor destroyed, and nor is love. Like the twisting chains of molecules
that become a leaf, a robin, a plastic i.v. bag of saline, an ocean, so love
morphs and grows and braids among everything that is and was.
Love, though, is not a panacea. A chirpy video does not
insulate middle school students from the personal struggle of adolescence. Love
in all its many forms and immeasurable volume, and from so many hearts, did not
keep my dad alive.
Still, it is the best thing we have. Love doesn’t halt or
erase the awfulness of life. Rather, love highlights and is the wonderfulness of it all. Love is a thick wool
coat against the cold, not a stopping of the howling winds.
In these first weeks of learning how to live with a
Dad-sized hole in my life, I am trying to be better at seeing all the love that
is always going on. I want to use my words and actions and life to wrap around
who and what I love so that fewer sharp or icy or unwelcome troubles touch them. I
want to be patient and grateful and dig deep to see the love underneath
everything. Following another line of Wilder’s advice, I hope to slow down and
take the time to look at everyone, knowing how little time we have. I know I will fail and fall down on this task, but I trust that I will always rise up and try again another day.
One morning in the hospital, my dad was opening a sheaf of
cards that had just arrived. “Jesus Christ,” he joked with his singular gleam
in the eye and glittering chuckle, “I can’t possibly owe this many people
money…they must actually like me.”
Let’s no longer wait for the crises and eleventh hours to
wrap each other up in love. Love may not be going anywhere, and will not stop the winds outright, but we will not
always be here to say and do what we might, however the words come out of our hearts and minds and hands.
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| My wonderful dad, bull-trout riding in Missoula, Montana, in 2009. |
