Love Is Stronger Than Death
Arthur Dobrin

9-Being Exposed

"To love one who loves you," wrote Madame de Giradin, "to admire one who admires you, in a word, to be the idol of one's idol, is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven."

Every life is a gift and every love the gift of joy. Death seems to take it all away. Yet not everything is lost. That love can continue to live through the act of remembrance. Judaism provides for the yizkor service, the word meaning 'he shall remember' in Hebrew. Catholics light candles in church to remember those who have died. Many Africans set aside small portions of food at meals and Shintos ring bells in temples.

It is in memory that the links to the past are forged. Out of the sadness of death and the ache of love can come a new strength and capacity to go on. The person we lose in death is not obliterated if we affirm life and deny despair. Memory is part of the healing process that brings together life and death as a mark of gratitude and an expression of love. Through the actions of the survivors the dead do live on.

Because we loved we feel the sorrow of death. And because love is not contained by the boundaries of our physical bodies it returns to us.

Until we are ready to embrace life again, as healing takes its erratic and eccentric course, all we can ask is for others to be near. As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, "Be near me when my light is low/ when the blood creeps, and the nerves prick/ and tingle, and the heart is sick,/ and all the wheels of being slow." So too Archibald MacLeish has written, "Then blow on the coal of the heart,/ It's all the light now."

What we ask of friends is warmth. We need friends when we think that all we have is ashes. Friends can help us to know that it is not ashes that remain but embers that can billow into flame once more.

Friends are essential for death makes us feel alone and exposed. "Feeling vulnerable without one's lifelong companion," writes Ies Spetter, "easily raises doubts as to whether one can ever again be intimate with another person."

Ies Spetter relates the story of a widow who confessed to him that she felt morally tortured because she had dinner with a male companion at the same table at which she once ate with her husband. The feeling of unfaithfulness was overwhelming. As she and her friend deepened their emotional and sexual interest in one another, she became more anxious. "She became obsessive about keeping her home spotless," Spetter writes, "and only by being helped to realize that she was in fact engaged in postponed mourning could she slowly overcome self-deprecation. Then slowly she could see herself reclaiming her life, by building new ways to sharing and, ultimately, daring to love again without self-reproach."

Mourning is an emotional process. It cannot be hurried but it can be helped. Thomas Scheff tells the story of a woman whose young daughter died. Two years after the death the mother was contemplating suicide. She went to a therapist who helped her through the transition from refusing to admit the reality of her daughter's death to a point at which the woman was ready to engage life once again. The therapist encouraged the woman to bring a photograph of her daughter to the sessions. There he asked her to talk to the girl's picture. Finally she was able to say, "I've got to send you away. I don't want to because I love you. I want you to be here with me. But I've got to let you go, even though I can't. Good-bye, my love."

Love is Stronger than Death

Arthur Dobrin

Copyright 1986 by Arthur Dobrin