"...love feels like freedom"
Grief can feel like it is a bit of an in-between place. I wonder lately what is it in between?
If it is in-between anything, perhaps it could be nestled between two places where we are heavy in loving. The act of it. So overwhelming could the act of loving be that we rest our grieving bodies.
Although grieving is also fundamentally deep loving work in and of itself, it can also be heavy for us. We may need to rest our grieving bodies. Love on our bodies some other way.
On a recent episode of How to Survive the End of the World called Loving Ourselves Right Now, the question “What love feels like?” was posed to listeners. The following is a listener response recorded in their anonymous voice that really moved me in it’s simplicity and truth.
“I had a childhood definition of love when I was little. I was a little kid taking a bath for the first time, old enough to do it by myself but small enough to not know the after part. I came out of the tub shivering, naked and wet. My mom was holding a towel in front of the fireplace. She embraced me with a warm towel. So I literally felt her love.
As an adult, love has meant many things, but most recently love feels like freedom.”
I am moved by both the listener’s childhood and also adult definitions of love. That a child could remember, what feels like for many parents to be almost daily mundane acts of care, as the definition of love itself, swelled my mother’s heart and moved me to tears. But also I know these acts are also anything but mundane. I have learned (finally) to take joy in the act of caring for my children. I feel at times it is an art, a skill, a practice that expands the way I love for others. The way I love my children is also informed by the way I allow others to love me and how I love them.
The other definition which was brief, was love as freedom. Ultimate freedom. How free do you need to be to love within this society as it truly is? How free must we be to love through the slaughter of children, Black elderly people grocery-shopping, Taiwanese church-goers? I’m sitting with that question.
How free are we if we have no relief from the grief to be able to love?
What if the relief from the grief was the loving?
What does loving our communities look like? How specific can we get? How can we wrap our communities with a warm towel by a fireplace so they really feel it? How do we protect each other from the cold? What if we could sit with these questions together?
Some new things I have going on:
The Community Deathcare Digest is LIVE! It’s a mutual-aid effort to provide financial support for funerals/burials/cremations/death rituals. It’s a Substack and we have an Instagram. I encourage you to follow us in both places and please share with us any requests you learn of in your communities of families struggling to pay for end-of-life expenses. We, Eliana Yoneda and I, are bringing forth this effort which will be managed by us, but it will truly only flourish with the love that comes out of community. And we hope to create deathcare that looks this way.
In our latest post we share some ways to financially support the families of Robb Elementary School and the Uvalde community.
We also have two upcoming death cafes. One, tomorrow, for the Asian community. And one the following week for BIPOC/PGM people, on our regular First Thursdays of the month offering. You can sign up for either at this link.
Loving within it all feels to me like the most revolutionary act. Fighting for love. Shutting down the economy and the streets for love. What if we were free enough to truly love each other?