Love Vast and Shattered

Thanks to the card and chocolate industries, today's a Big Day in February.
 
It’s tailor made for my friend Michele, who at 44 years old, is engaged to be married for the first time. This is the Valentine’s Day she has been waiting for her whole life. Cue the romance, flowers, champagne.
 
But for most of us, our bruised and broken hearts don’t neatly fit in that box, that Hollywood movie, right now. Thanks to the relentless marketing, this day is bittersweet. There’s a lot of pressure on us to measure up to some impossible standard.

At just 9, my daughter Ali is having a rough go of it in fourth grade, and Valentine’s Day is, frankly, pushing her over the edge. Desperate for a win for months now, she has set her heart on placing in the “Valentine’s Day Box” class decoration contest. She has made THREE separate trips to Target with her Dad over a two-week period, redoing her box countless times. It has been unicorn themed, basketball themed, rainbow themed, 3-D messaging themed. She has had so many melt downs I told her I would reward her a prize of her choice just for getting the damn thing in. How to make her stop looking for validation outside of herself? How to get her to love herself first?
 
I think of my cousin Jill and her kids Jenny, Garrett, Nicki and Jimmy, getting through the day for the first time without our beloved Gary.
 
My siblings and I marvel that “a year ago today Mom and Dad were mobile, functional…. alive.” This is our first year without a card or call from them. The silence is grey.
 
I think of my friend L, who is staying with her parents while her mom undergoes radiation, and of my friends Anna and Janine who have buried their children. And of course, my friends Nancy and Jack, widowed now for several years, come to mind. I don’t think the day gets easier.
 
Nor has it ever been a slam dunk for friends Molly, Cindy, Donna, and John, who never married.
 
I think of another friend L, whose husband unexpectedly lost his job ten days ago. This was shortly after a strong performance review.
I see my own husband bowed under by similar stress. 
 
I receive a lovely Valentine’s Day card from my friend Stephanie, who divorced her unreliable husband after years of struggle, after they finally lost their home. She, I realize, is on to something – sending a card to me from her new condo.
 
Stephanie understands how the rest of us wounded imperfects can celebrate.  It’s more than just be grateful for what IS working (though that is always helpful). 
The secret lies in this, best expressed by Leonard Cohen:
 
Now I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, 
with a love so vast 
And so shattered, 
it will reach you everywhere.
 
And I sing this for the captain whose ship has not been built,
 for the mother in Confusion, her cradle still unfilled.
 
For the heart with no companion, 
for the soul without a king. 
for the prima Ballerina who cannot dance to anything.
 
Here’s to us, who live on the other side of sorrow and despair. 
 
Like a shattered mirror that has the capacity to reflect more light, may our cracked and damaged hearts see each other, greet each other, hold each other. To recognize each other from our place of brokenness.
 
We are both those who have not yet achieved dreams, like the mother with the still unfilled cradle. And we are those who no longer have what we once enjoyed, like the prima ballerina past her prime. 
 
But we show up, alive, here, now, with an appreciation for what each other has, and has not been through.
 
We understand all too well the messy reality of love, with its loss, disappointments, illusions and loneliness. We step in to the daily reality of love, with its hope and its humor, its loyalty and its grace. 
 
For as the ever-brilliant Cohen also observed, 
 
“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
 
Life’s too short to consider ourselves unworthy of love, too short to put up barriers to love, too short to be consumed with longing.
 
Here’s to leaning in to love; to celebrating love, in all heart break, creativity, immeasurability and diversity.
 
Tonight, I will put out our best china, that was once my parents’, and our finest glasses. We will try a new recipe and light candles. We will delight in our being together, despite the fact that we’ve been isolating together for months thanks to Omicron. 
 
Ali’s box did not win. But we will toast our half-full glasses to our LA friends celebrating the Superbowl Win, to our extended family, to our friends from childhood, to our new friends in Albuquerque, to our teachers and mentors, to our selves as we are, here, in this moment in time.
 
Happy Valentine’s Day. Here’s to us, Love.