Using the word "LOVE."

I am having a crappy, painful night, but this is something that can’t wait…it is bubbling out. Spanish coming. Ya vine en español. 

USING THE WORD "LOVE"

Some people say that I am all “Peace and Love and stuff.” Some people se me as exceedingly effusive and quite lovey-dovey. Many attribute it to my being a “hippie,” or to my having grown up in the 60’s.

Actually, I rarely used the word “love,” before recently. I was never comfortable saying “I love you” to ANYBODY, and forced myself to choke it out to my Mother, only after I was in my 30’s, because *she deserved it so.* I had a very difficult time telling the men I loved “I love you,” and I simply did not tell my friends that. Just couldn’t.

Spanish came in handy, because in that language there are two types of love — two different verbs. One love is “querer.” Querer is very beautiful, affectionate, sometimes enduring, and all around good.

Then there is AMAR. Amar is real, deep, true, giving, loving suffering, forever LOVE.

How liberating. It was much easier for me to say “I love you” in Spanish, employing “querer” instead of “amar!"

But no, my using the word "love” certainly was not something life-long, or did it become a custom until I was in my 40’s. What did it? What changed? It was when I began to work with hospice, and also with (economically) poor kids who have cancer, and to work with their families. I grew to know and love them all, and many of them have died. Many will still die.

I have not known ONE of these beautiful beings who didn’t start using the word “love” a lot more freely.  The dying children I have known express love almost constantly. They worry about their parents. I have been told more than a handful of times, “I just wish that I could tell Mommy and Daddy that I love them from heaven.” These children literally are dying to say the word LOVE just once more than they have been granted.

I have had the deep honor to accompany many dying adults on their journeys from their bodies.  If I had to guess, I would bet that it's some 98% of them express regret at not having said “I love you” enough times. I have heard many, many say, “God if only she’d known how much I loved her…”

THAT changed me profoundly and permanently. THAT did it.

My husband, a serious, very almost stereotypical Finnish strongman, says “I love you” constantly.  At first (this is before my working with the dying) he couldn’t believe that I could not say it back to him. Then I started trying to spit it out, with great difficulty. Now, hell. I love to say it, to "my" kids, to my friends, to my animals…it is my fortune to have my life, and a privelege to experience the love that is inside me…and *to express it.* Thank you Leif, my enduring, darling strongman.

How stingy so many of us are with our kind words and compliments. How tight we are with the meting and doling out of that word "love." I rarely address my innermost emotions—— no way. The first time I ever referred to tears in a public group, *in my life* was the other night in a small group on FB! I have been --most of us have been -- taught his way. And within limits, the teaching is not bad.

 

But how it costs so many of us to use that word…l…l….lo…lov…love. I could not bring myself to utter the words for so many years, though the love I felt for so many was deep, deep as the ocean and more. How damaged I was, how much beauty suffocated with the hesitation to simply *love.*

So many, many people are denied that privilege, every single day. As I write this, another child goes. And another adult too, who wanted to say it just once more.

With that…I am off to get more ice for my head. I think that this did me in. Time for bed. Good night, beautiful partners!

LOVE, joana