Where We Put Our Love
My therapist asked me once, “Where do you want to put your love?” Whether time, energy, or passion, we invest ourselves in where we put our love. If it’s a career, we don’t want to stop working. If it’s a sport we don’t want to get injured. We don’t want the things we love to end. For most people, the important places are the reasons we jump up and check to make sure the baby’s still breathing or call our criticizing mothers. We don’t want people — or our relationships with them — to end either. Death is scary. We’re afraid of that gaping pain. It can leave us numb, hopeless, furious, reckless, and feral.
When I was eight I watched my father die. It was slow and painful — colon cancer. In the ’70s and ’80s treatments were primitive. There were pounding footsteps to the bathroom, a half-closed door, retching. An undercurrent of dread carried us along, but his illness wasn’t discussed, at least in front of me and my sister. Toward the end, when he was on morphine, the nurses broke the rules about kids visiting that part of the hospital and let us visit him in the hospital. He was relatively incoherent by then. To see him, pale and alien, was a necessary but horrifying revelation. This, then, was death: eyes rolling back to the whites, tubes with entries covered by tape, thin gowns and scratchy blankets. Death was cold, frightening, foreign, and lonely. Family lore is that I said something to him that set…
