The thing about love by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

Here’s the thing about love. It won’t hold still. I’m not saying that it’s not possible for feelings to remain constant. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. There are people we know all our lives and those we are lucky enough to meet later in life, but not too late to experience love. I’m not sure if it’s ever too late to experience love.

There are things, however, that it gets too late for. Having children, for one. Biological ones, I mean. Again, it’s never too late for young ones to enter our lives, assuming we haven’t become isolated in an old person’s ghetto or simply in our own homes.

For myself, it’s too late to learn to ski (though, if I’m truthful, it was too late when I tried it in my early thirties; I suspect it would have been too late—to put it diplomatically—at any age). Also to ice skate (ditto what I said about skiing). Actually, there’s a whole host of athletic activities whose ship sailed a very long time ago.

But I digress. This was supposed to be about love. What was it I was groping my way toward? It’s a many splendored thing, as a good friend keeps reminding me, but that wasn’t it.

Right. It won’t hold still. No matter how perfect the moment, how intimately connected we feel to another person, there will be a next moment, and a next, and the perfection will become a memory. We can’t only live in those perfect moments. And, at this age, one knows there’s no such thing as happily ever after.

I had many of those moments in Maui and Seattle. I cuddled with old friends (you can only cuddle with old friends; perhaps that’s one of the definitions of old friendship). I shared memories and silence.

I think where I’m trying to go is to the acknowledgment that no matter how much love we share with others, ultimately we are alone. Oh dear, that sounds rather gloomy. I don’t mean it that way. I want to get underneath the sorrowful part to the joy in being alive part, the part that comes with knowing how much love I give and receive. For me, visual reminders of precious people and moments are what keep me connected to that part of myself.

When my goddaughter was little and someone would comment on how I seemed to be taking a lot of photographs, she would say, with a smile and a shrug, “Oh that’s just Ruthie. She always does that.”

A new friend and I toured Eleanor Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park last weekend. I was struck by something the guide pointed out, something that wasn’t about history or politics or FDR. “Notice all the pictures on the walls,” she said. “Whenever Eleanor made a good connection with someone she asked them for their photograph and drove down to the local department store for a plain black frame. Then she put them on her wall. Whatever room she was in, she wanted to be surrounded by those she loved.”

That’s one way to make love stand still. I’m with Eleanor.