I will follow

One night about two weeks ago, somewhere close to midnight, when I’d finally run out of spontaneous reasons to stay up long enough to be sleep deprived the next day (night Nathan always sabotages morning Nathan), I went to bed.

Crawling in beside Lauren, I laid my head back on the pillow and took a deep breath, trying to let the bed absorb the weight of the day as I sunk into the mattress. Lauren was awake, and we began to talk in voices trained by a baby sleeping within earshot. We looked back on the day and, like we always do, on how cute Eve was and how lucky we were and how we hope it never ends. As we paused for a moment, smiling in the dark, Lauren said something which wasn’t so significant for what she said but how she said it.
With a quiet sadness, she said softly: “I love life so much."

And she does. She does love it so much. She loves every bit of it, the people who we share it with, the memories of childhood and of high school and yesterday when Eve laughed and Christmas and vacations and going to the movies and the first day of Spring. But that love, as much joy as it brings her, is not felt without a cost. The cost is the knowledge that life ends, a truth made bitter by living, and that no matter how much we love it, life is not ours to keep. It’s a gift, meant to be loved, but meant to be given up. And the deeper the love, the tighter our grip on this gift, until at last we are forced to come to terms with its parting, which is just impossible.

And so Lauren, knowing this, having the foresight to see that love cannot be without loss, combined in one statement love and sadness, a simple statement that somehow sums up a very profound irony.

Lauren’s not a melancholy person. She doesn’t live with guarded emotions. On the contrary, she gives herself completely to life, to joy and happiness, to relationships, and she feels everything, all the way through. Her comment that night was sincere, just like her life.

I don’t remember what I said back to her right then. I like the way her statement sounded, and I hope I left it hanging in the air for effect. I may have gotten excited at such a philosophical musing and rambled about the “tragic dualities” of life or something made-up like that and ruined it, but I can’t remember. What I would like to say now, though, is that while what she said was true in both its plain meaning and its intention, she will not have to experience her love of life or the pain of its loss alone. I will be by her side, until I’m not. I will share it all with her until I can’t anymore.

And when it must be, like the song says, I will follow her into the dark, or I will wait there for her.

N