I wish I could put in to words my faith. The strength of what I believe. I know I can’t explain why I believe it. I just know it’s there and I trust it implicitly. It is my absolute truth.
My faith is simple.
I do not believe that love can die.
It can’t.
There is nothing anyone can say to me to make me believe the feeling, the power, the actions of love – dies.
If love dies how do we manage to reflect on the comfort and courage it gives us?
If love dies how are we able to go to the memories of our love and recall with such vividness – the life of that love?
If love dies how is it we can find joy and even laughter in the recalling of it?
If love dies how do we manage to gather strength and determination to continue in the wakes and waves of our pain?
If love dies how do we exist when it leaves us? When we feel it is oh so wrongly taken from us.
When my father died I never knew such shock. Along with my siblings and his siblings and family and friends, we all experienced it. My first full experience with disbelief. Isn’t that what happens when death steals from you a life you expected to have for much much longer? It’s not real – it can’t be! I’m expected to exist without this man who has always been there.
It’s probably through his death that I’ve come to rely stronger on my faith. Not my religion. My faith. My faith in love. My faith in the essence of who we are. And if we are love, and I believe we are, then how does our existence stop when our bodies cease to exist. I don’t believe it does.
If my father’s love for us had died with his physical death, why then, do I feel so much stronger in the knowledge of his love for me? If his love died, how is it possible for me to cry with emotion when I think of his words of encouragement, or remember the security of his presence in my life-and feel it still? How is any of this possible if his love died with him?
There will be a time when my children will question my passing. And I don’t want them to question it. I want them to believe in the existence of something that I hold for them, that I live for them, that lives of me for them. There is no way that you can convince me that this love I have for them will end with my physical death. This love is not physical. It is not of my body. You can not take my love from me. You can not tell me to stop loving. And seeing how it is not of a physical existence how can it possibly just die.
Do we not still ponder thoughts of great philosophers? Do we still hear music created from the thoughts and emotions of someone gone from here for centuries? Do we still gaze at images that passed through the mind and out of the fingers of great artists who have long ago died? It isn’t their bodies that created – it was their emotions. The body was used as a tool to put their creations in to our physical world. Creation does not come from our bodies. It comes from something housed within our bodies.
When I’ve struggled in the past with loss and learning to live with loss something occurred to me. I can imagine the death of my body. I accept that I will die from here. My physical existence will end. That makes sense to me. I don’t argue it. I don’t fear it. I don’t look forward to it because of what I do love here. But I accept all of this.
What I cannot accept is that how I feel will no longer exist. I love so many and I am loved by so many. Even after the death of others I have felt their love. And I have felt the love from those of us left behind for those who have died before us.
How can I accept that love dies when all of the emotional evidence in my life tells me it does not?
It’s not what I tell myself for comfort.
It’s what comforts me because it is.
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