love now, pay later
There is a sentence about grief that I keep coming back to:
Grief is the price we pay for love.
I used to think it was meant to be comforting.
I’m not sure it is.
There is nothing particularly comforting about being told that the reason something hurts so badly is because it once made you very happy. If anything, it seems a little cruel. Here is this person, this animal, this friendship, this place, this life you have grown attached to—and somewhere inside loving it is the quiet guarantee that, one way or another, you will eventually have to lose the version of it you know now.
Maybe not to death.
Sometimes people simply leave. Friendships become Christmas-card relationships. Parents get older. Children grow up. A house gets sold. A pet who once met you at the door becomes a photograph you can't look at for a while. Even the happiest seasons of our lives eventually end simply because time keeps moving.
Love makes hostages of us in that way.
The moment something becomes precious, we become capable of losing it.
And yet, knowing this has never seemed to stop us.
That's the part of the sentence I find most interesting.
If grief really is the price of love, then human beings are remarkably willing to go into debt.
We bring home the puppy knowing, somewhere in the part of our minds we'd rather not visit, that we will probably outlive it. We let people become necessary to us despite having absolutely no guarantee they'll stay. We build traditions that will hurt when there is eventually an empty chair. We memorize someone's laugh without meaning to. We develop favorite restaurants with people, songs that belong to certain years, stupid inside jokes that will someday require explanation.
We keep giving ordinary things the power to devastate us.
Which sounds like a terrible system.
But what would the alternative be?
To love everything a little less so losing it might hurt a little less?
I don't think I want that.
There is a temptation, after losing something, to wish you had protected yourself better. Maybe I shouldn't have gotten so attached. Maybe I shouldn't have needed them so much. Maybe if I had remembered all along that nothing lasts forever, I could have kept some distance between myself and the eventual pain.
But I wonder what kind of life that distance would have purchased.
Less grief, certainly.
Less everything else, too.
Because grief does not arrive alone. It arrives carrying evidence. The reason a room suddenly feels empty is because someone once filled it. The reason a date on the calendar hurts is because it used to mean something. The reason you miss the sound of paws coming down the hallway is because, for years, they came running toward you.
Grief points backward.
It says: There was something here.
Something worth becoming accustomed to. Something worth expecting tomorrow. Something woven so thoroughly into the ordinary architecture of your life that its absence could rearrange the entire room.
Maybe that is why I don't completely like calling grief a price.
A price sounds like something we pay once and receive something in return. Grief doesn't behave that neatly. Sometimes the bill arrives years later. Sometimes you think you've paid it and then a song plays in a grocery store and apparently there are additional charges.
But I understand the sentiment.
To love anything is to agree, without signing anything, that its loss would matter.
And perhaps that's not a flaw in love. Perhaps that's part of what makes love love.
The goal was never to get through life without acquiring anything we couldn't bear to lose. What a lonely accomplishment that would be.
I think I'd rather have a life full of things whose absence could break my heart.
People I got too attached to. Animals I loved for nowhere near long enough. Places I had to leave. Versions of my life I still occasionally ache for. Ordinary Tuesdays I didn't realize I would someday give anything to have back.
And when the bill eventually comes, I will probably hate the price.
But I hope I never mistake that pain for proof that loving something was a bad investment.
Grief may be the price we pay for love.
What a terrible thing it would be to have nothing worth paying for.