Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

by Natasha Lunn

The complacency of modern life is that a lot of us believe we are immortal, and that we deserve happiness. We think it’ll come to us, when actually we need to stop and look around in order to see that it’s already there.

Minimizing loss does not help; it belittles the child’s experience. We help children by being with them in their grief; standing with them in their experience of loss.

there is peace in submitting to facts that cannot be changed, instead of wrestling against them,

Some people think that love fixes everything – and it doesn’t. You can use it as a distraction but it’s not going to remove your suffering, ever, about anything, even in little ways. You might think, I’ll be less anxious if I have a partner, but you won’t be, unless you figure out how to do that by yourself. Just as having a partner is not going to solve your problems, it’s not going to make you into someone else.

What do you wish you had known about loss? That it’s coming, for all of us. Some people are luckier than others, obviously, but everybody’s going to have the rug pulled out from under them at some point.

We’re all textured by the gaping holes that are left by the death of people close to us. Gently, over time, the emptiness softens. It’ll always be there in some description and it’s essential to carry these things consciously around with you, the good and the bad.

We might avoid talking about death because we can’t bear to think about losing the people we love, when actually, not talking about it is one of the reasons we can take them for granted every day. Perhaps by facing the truth – that, if we’re lucky, we get to exist alongside them in this world for decades, not centuries – we will remember to look into their faces more than our phone screens.

I also lived alongside a fear of someone else leaving me. So I pretended I didn’t need anything from anyone, because actually I needed so much that I was afraid somebody would see right through me.

One particularly painful echo of loss is loneliness. The feeling that everyone else lives in a different, happier world, and you are stuck outside its window, looking in, unable to participate. But this, at least, is one facet of loss we have power over. Although no one can fix our grief, as Lisa showed me, admitting to each other that we are in pain is how we begin to heal.

Every time I formed a firm opinion, another answer reshaped it. This process was a lesson in itself: however many conversations on love I had, I would never find a fixed set of responses to its challenges. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote, ‘Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.’ It was humbling, reassuring even, to realize that the answer would always change, depending on where I was standing in the length of my life.

Do you think accepting that suffering is part of not just life, but love, can help us to live more meaningfully? I do. There are two parts to it: understanding that the people you love will suffer and also that you will be there, holding their hand, and that is an important part of loving them. It’s part of the deal. It’s why it’s brave and beautiful to love somebody.

Because I was distracted by my future fears – and I succumbed to them. I was trying to achieve the impossible: to stop something that might not happen.

Sometimes, I realized, we lose more from fear itself than the thing we are afraid of.

None of us can protect ourselves from tomorrow, the next day, the next month, the next year. All we can do is try our best not to squander love on a fear of something that might or might not happen.

At first, I thought the lesson of my loss was to protect myself from a similar ambush in the future, by holding back love. And now? I see that the uncertainty love requires is not a problem to be fixed; it is what makes it beautiful. It invites courage. It asks us to hope, without evidence, without knowing.

Love is a choice – and sometimes it’s choosing to love someone even when we don’t feel lovingly towards them. The feeling of being ‘in love’ comes and goes, ebbs and flows, but the action of loving is a decision. One we make every day.

Love will always flow through our lives in this inconsistent, unknowable way, and we cannot press pause on the joyful bits, nor fast-forward the suffering. All we can do is keep noticing when there is an imbalance, keep adjusting our efforts to make sure the people we love know that they are important to us.

Each day we have to fight small battles to notice the love that’s right in front of us. This

I hope that on my last day on earth I’ll look back on it all and think, love is astonishing, life is astonishing. How grateful I am, not only to have known love, but to have known just how important it was, to pay attention to it.