Is Love Eternal?

It is a wedding like none other. The bride changes into a white tee shirt and white sweat pants. She wears no veil, her hair has barely grown back after chemo. Yet she is the healthy one. The groom is helped into a clean hospital gown for the ceremony, then his bed is wheeled into the Quite Room down the hall of the Palliative Care Unit. He is mere days away from his death. The hospital Chaplain begins by reminding everyone gathered that this is not a legal wedding, only a spiritual union. When the Chaplain recites the vows she carefully omits any reference to “Till death do us part”.

Only a month prior I had attended the wedding of my beloved niece, hers was a wedding built upon hope and potentiality. Both of them are young, healthy, and destined to produce beautiful children. Her guests gifted them items which anticipated the future they will pursue together: china sets, furnishings, small appliances. Their vows spoke of leaving behind one kind of life in exchange for beginning anew. Now here I am weeks later crammed into a small room with Mary and John, a few hospital staff and scant family members.

Mary, a woman in her mid-forties, is stage three cancer, on a break from her treatment. She tells me it was John who had nursed her through the worst of it, while he was dealing with his own. As the bride clutches her bouquet with one hand, she weeps uncontrollably when she takes the grooms’ right hand with her own. It feels to me as though this is more a funeral than a wedding.

Then the hospital’s Music Therapist sings and plays on the keyboard the couple’s theme song, Love Me Tender made famous by Elvis Presley. As she sings the plaintive lyrics, Love me long, Never let me go, I wonder why the bride is committing herself to widowhood. Since this is not a legal marriage, she will not benefit financially. There will be no children, no memories forged together, no growing old with each other. Perhaps this wedding is a celebration of a shared past for this middle-aged couple?

But what was that shared past built upon? They met in the waiting room of their oncologist’s office a few years ago. They bonded over shared grief, they shared the same anxiety for an uncertain future. There could not have been much physical passion in the relationship as both were undergoing debilitating treatments. Neither could have afforded vacations together, as cancer robs people of both time and finances. Was it their mutual dependence that they were celebrating in marriage? Was it about gratitude? While traditional marriage contracts end till death do us part, perhaps they have fanciful notions of being united after death in some spiritual paradise?

If so, is love eternal, something that outlives the human body? It made me reflect on the very nature of this most abstract of human emotions. It seems to me that undiluted love is never deliberate. The unlikeliest of people love each other for no apparent reason. But isn’t this type of love without a gain the purest form of love? When I think of the people in my life that I love I cannot give you a reason why I love them, I just do. Sure, I can list a dozen things about them I admire and appreciate, but then I can also list a dozen things about them I wish they could/would change. Pure love is selfless, it neither demands a profit in the future, nor does it borrow from a shared past.  Perhaps love in its purest form lives intensely in the present, the here and now.

Far from that being a romantic notion, I think it is entirely rational. There is a reality to the here and now that the past and the future do not enjoy. The past lives entirely in my memory and is subject to revision and forgetting. The future lives in my imagination and it too is variable, swayed by either hope or fear. But the fleeting present has a stability, a centre around which all change happens. Where is that centre located? Is it not within me? Don’t I declutter the present by gravitating to the things I love and I push away the things I don’t. Even in my imaginary future I fear the the things I do not love and I plot to be with all that I do love. Similarly, my strongest memories are of all that I have loved and I try hard to forget the things that brought me pain. Love is the centre around which my past, present and future revolves.

So perhaps John and Mary discovered this fact because of their circumstance. When everything in their lives was stripped away by the cancer, they were left with nothing but the essence: the love at the very core of presence. Perhaps they discovered that eternity is not about everlasting time, rather it is the core around which the past, present and future revolve. This core that lends reality and stability to each fleeting present moment.