Letter #75: Love After Life

Tongues will fall silent; knowledge will cease.

Lots has been written and said about love, for all the good it’s done us. To me, the people who talk most about what love is are the people who seem least qualified to demonstrate it. They sound like aliens trying to mimic behavior that comes naturally to humans.

Take the kids’ YouTuber Ms. Rachel, who declared that she’s “standing strong in love” for Pride Month. She seems to share in the widespread misperception that love means squeaking out friendly platitudes while people destroy themselves, because telling them not to would be mean. Her critics at least understand that love can involve setting boundaries. But a lot of them act like that’s all it involves. On one side, chipper derangement. On the other, tight-lipped hectoring. Have these people never been outside before?

Maybe it’s not surprising that love would be hard to get right in words. It is, above all, the thing that will survive after all words fail. “Where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be silenced. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.” Of the things that will remain, the greatest is love.

For all the sermonizing, I rarely hear people talk about the shattering fact that love is post-apocalyptic. It endures when speech and thought are annihilated, along with sight and sound and every crude tool we use to communicate ourselves to one another. Love is before and after every landscape, every atom, every word. It is evident first and foremost in the very fact that you and I were chosen to be plucked from nothingness. No explanation can exhaust it, and neither can the heat death of the universe.

I know a story of an old man whose dementia shaved away his memories until all he could do was run through his most basic routines. And because he had prayed the rosary all his life, he kept repeating its words. “Our father…” Everything else had melted to nothingness. Time and space, past and future were beyond the reach of his mind. But he was there, and God was there, and he knew it. I think that’s love.

I would dismiss this story as an urban legend—except that when my own grandmother was slipping away, my sister and I took my nephew to meet her in the old folks’ home. We sweated through the subway in the summer, lugging this stroller to the feet of a woman who rarely knew our names. And after all that, so help me, we showed her that baby and Grandma knew exactly who she was looking at.

The kid, who had been miserable just moments before, beamed at her. She grinned back. It’s my great-grandson: in knowing him she remembered herself. I think that’s love, too.

When everything perishable is scoured away, I suspect we will know ourselves in what we instinctively reach for—what we love most. And maybe—breathtaking thought—we’re deciding what that is even now.