Each week, I’m going to be sharing some things I’ve learned from stuff I’ve read. Topics may range from philosophy to sports and anywhere in between.
Over drinks with a friend in college, I remember coming to a strange realization about relationships: they either end in a breakup or marriage. For someone in his early 20s, I remember thinking that this core truth about relationships was the scariest thing about love. But now, as a wizened 27 year-old, I’ve come to the conclusion that it really isn’t.
The scariest part about love is one person dying and the other person being left behind.
In Greek mythology, there’s this story about Zeus granting a wish to an older couple who were at the tail end of long, happy marriage. They could have chosen anything in the world: immortality, wealth, or fame.
Instead, they chose to die at the exact same moment. Upon their deaths, Zeus then turned their bodies into two intertwined trees to commemorate the couple’s love.
Ancient Greek myths aside, the problem of someone being left behind isn’t something we talk about much with regards to love. So much of our discussion around love revolves around finding the perfect partner, rather than figuring out what to do if said perfect partner dies before we do. The latter problem is just such a depressing area to explore that most movies, tv shows, and books just end up ignoring it altogether.
Recently though, I was pleasantly surprised to find a discussion of this problem in Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
After many glasses of gin, a twice-married cardiologist named Mel begins rambling to his wife and two friends about coping with the death of a partner:
Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us - excuse me for saying this - but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know.1
To Mel, love is resilient and powerful enough to overcome grief. In his world, we grieve, but we’ll always be able to love again.
I actually think Mel is right under certain circumstances. Mel, being relatively young and having a successful career as a cardiologist, will likely be able to love again if something happened to Terri.
Given enough time and under the right circumstances, many of us would be able to overcome tragedy so that we can love romantically again.
But that’s assuming we have enough time. In the case of the old couple in the Greek myth, there wouldn’t be enough time for the surviving partner to grieve, heal, and find love again. Life is too short for that.
In a world without time constraints, maybe Mel would be right. Perhaps, in an infinite loop, we could love for a while, grieve upon a relationship ending, and then find love again.
But death, that pesky little constraint in our lives, forces us to choose and given how short our lives are, there aren’t many chances for redos. I think that’s the saving grace for those of us who feel terrified about being left behind or leaving our partner behind.
We are terrified because we chose wisely. In the most important decision of our life, we found someone who is so essential to our existence that we are scared shitless by the very idea of being without that person.
That, I think, is a fear worth having.
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Mel’s rant has to be one of the most compelling arguments against drinking alcohol. Alcohol’s the only substance that can cause a grown man to declare in front of his wife how he’d be able to live on just fine if she died.