It’s love’s illusions that we recall

It’s love’s illusions that we recall

 By: Craig Dresang, CEO, YoloCares

The holidays can be complicated.  They carry mixed emotions for nearly everyone.  This is especially true for the 300 YoloCares families enrolled in hospice or palliative care this season.  Many people look forward to being together with family while simultaneously trying to forget past affronts . . .  including the trivial disagreements, political arguments, inebriated insults, and painful debacles of the past.

The seasonal selective memory that carefully edits out ancient sins blankets the country in December.  It is a time to set aside squabbles and share meaningful family stories and rituals.  It is in that spirit, that I share a personal reflection and family story, called “It’s love’s illusions that we recall” during our shared season of human kindness and connection. 

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Something weird happens when someone you love dies. Your memory of them becomes selective and more refined. If love, in its purest form, is present in a relationship — even a dysfunctional and imperfect one — then the bruises and burns of that relationship have a way of becoming muted.  The love and goodness of that bond become clearer. Memories become ever present as a source of comfort, inspiration and nostalgia. A longing and appreciation for what was takes on a new dimension. Perhaps this is why people around the globe, and through the ages, have come to believe that love is the only thing that transcends time and space.

Uma, the mother goddess who is central in Hinduism, teaches that love is a basic component of divine nature, and the very thread that unites all beings and permeates the universe as we know it. The Apostle Paul, in the Bible’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, said the three things that will last forever are faith, hope and love. “And the greatest of these is love,” he concludes.

The human race did not invent this indefinable, and in some ways not fully expressible, thing called love. To some extent our understanding of love’s source and its power remains a mystery. We know love when we see it and experience it, but we are unable to adequately define it. As the character Dr. Amelia Brand says in the 2014 science fiction film, Interstellar, perhaps love “means something more, something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we cannot consciously perceive.” Nothing of great value comes easily. To preserve our relationships, we must often pass through many difficulties and hardships. As we do, it is the presence and power of love that carries us through.

So my recollections of loved ones are overshadowed, not by disagreements and disappointments (and there may have been many), but by the richness of our connection, acts of selflessness, and our belief in each other.

It has been 30 years since my maternal grandmother, Hazel, died. Even so, her razor-sharp wit, clever sense of humor, and craft of storytelling are part of my life every day. She had a way of being funny without realizing the potency and brilliance of her own rare strain of humor. Some memories with Grandma Hazel will never leave me. In fact, they serve as a refuge and help me reconnect with who I have always been.

During one dreadfully hot and humid July, the two of us spent an entire weekend hacking down six-foot-tall weeds that had overtaken an abandoned chicken coop on the country property that she and my grandfather had just purchased outside of Fox Lake, Wisconsin. They wanted to grow a garden in its place, so we used machetes and muscle to reclaim a 15×40-foot patch of ground in order to grow tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, and onions. Once the hard labor was done, we carried our fishing poles to the end of the road where it disappeared into a vast lake. Hazel loved bullheads so we cast our lines in just the right spot, where the railroad tracks bridged over a narrow harbor, to reel in enough fish for dinner.

When we got back to the house from fishing, my grandfather asked Hazel for the car keys. She said, “Just a minute, Fran. My hands are dirty.” After washing fish slime and bait off her hands she reached into the top of her blouse, between her bosom, and pulled out her pack of cigarettes, a lighter, her checkbook, and then the car keys. “Oh, here they are,” she said. “Here you go.” It was a standing family joke that no one could pack a bra like grandma.

When it was time for bed that evening, I was in too much pain to fall asleep. I had spent most of the day shirtless as we worked to remove small trees and thick weeds with woody stalks from the old chicken coop. As a result, my back was severely sunburned, and I could hardly lay still. My grandmother came to the rescue with a homemade cooling lotion that helped soothe the redness and blisters on my back. I laid flat on my stomach while she gently rubbed her concoction into my skin. As she did, she retold the stories of our day and talked about all the fish we caught. For the first time I noticed her hands. They were gentle, but spotted and weathered by years and experiences that I will never know. As they tenderly moved across my back, I could not help but think that these were the same hands that tucked my mom into bed when she was a girl. I could hear the muffled sounds of a polka band coming from the television in the living room where my grandfather was watching the Lawrence Welk Show. The warmth of grandma’s voice began to trail off as I slipped into a deep sleep. Only a few times in my life have I felt as loved and grounded as I did that weekend at my grandparents’ house.

Since then, I have come to believe that love is so much more than emotion or feeling. It is an indescribable energy or power that can move a person to give a dollar to a homeless man panning for money at a stop light, rescue a drowning honeybee from a swimming pool, donate a kidney to someone who needs a second chance at life, or soothe a sunburn with a homespun potion and a tender hand. Hope, gratitude, bravery, forgiveness, kindness, and generosity all sprout and grow from ground that has been cultivated and irrigated with love. Clearly, humanity’s best traits show up where the soil is nutrient rich with this mysterious connection. And still, for all that we do know and understand about love, there will always be much more that we just do not know and may never understand.