Love's Scars

I distinctly remember the realization I had after the first time I got my heart badly broken. Everyone said, It'll pass, You will heal, This won't kill you, It gets better with time. And my realization, which came upon me one day mid-recovery while crying so hard I couldn't keep my eyes open long enough to see the tissue box, was that this was precisely the problem: Surviving something hurts like a bitch! If it had killed me, if I hadn't been able to heal, if time didn't do it's thing, then I wouldn't have had to go through the survival thing- the torturous learning experience, the painful growth stuff, and the what doesn't kill you makes you stronger routine. Survival is linked to the biting pain of loss, and it means carrying that pain with us and living with it, because no, it does not always kill us.

We were all happier before we lost that person we loved. Music, poetry, and films have reinforced this fact over and over again:

Raul Seixas, genius of Brazilian music, says in one of his songs, "Today I know/ that no one in this world is happy/ having loved once."

Pablo Neruda wrote, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long."

In the 1961 movie, Two Rode Together, Marshal Guthrie McCabe says, "You know, sometimes it takes a lot more courage to live than it does to die." (Perhaps an extreme example, but still- heartbreak can be extreme at times.)

And then, after it hurts enough to heal, we are left with a scar. The "break" in our hearts becomes a crease, the pain concealed neatly behind a stitch, and we move through life and, hopefully, let ourselves love again.

When I was going through that first "survival" process, I didn't know that it would be okay one day. I didn't know that today I would look back on it, think of him, see the scar, and feel grateful for the experience in its entirety. That deep, uncensored first love, followed by a loss that knocked the wind out of me, became the patchwork from which I constructed my survival mechanism. Because of it, I developed the mantra, "I have survived my past, and I give myself permission to let it go;" words I repeat to myself on almost a daily basis when I feel something from the past weighing me down.

My most recent scar has been throbbing a little lately, and I've had to attend to the residual grief. It's still painful. It still paralyzes me. I am still surviving it, and I am still letting it go. It doesn't get easier with time; surviving a loss. It mostly just becomes something I know I can do, and that gives me strength, but the work is still there: I still have to survive this.

The other realization I had after that first big loss was that the wounded knew something the unwounded did not. They knew the essence of the human experience: everything changes. "Nothing gold can stay," wrote Robert Frost. A sweet, tender love can turn bitter. The person who teaches us to live to our full potential can leave us one day. The one we want to protect with all of our might may be the one we end up hurting tremendously. There are no guarantees, or permanent states of loving- of living, for that matter- and what is true today may not be true forever.

In that sense, we best let people in. We do well to let them scar us. What we gain with love- the stories beneath the scars- that is life's fuel. Loss is not temporary, but suffering is. While what we have lost remains so, what we gain is also ours to keep. Part of us lives on in the hearts of others, and they live on in ours, even as our stories change.

I am grateful for all of love's scars. They are my treasured stories.

Let's go, I tell my heart today, let's go love again.