February 17th: The Expansive Property of Love

Nearly every week, it's inevitable that at some point I will think to myself, "Just when I thought I couldn't love [insert name] anymore, I do." And just like that, every week, I familiarize myself more and more with what I imagine parents who have more than one child or people with more than one lover already know: our love can balloon if we let it, like so much ice cream in an already-full belly, without (maybe) limit. I've taken to calling this feeling in my head The Expansive Property of Love. 

This is a curious phenomenon, though, unlike any other I've experienced, in part because The Expansive Property of Love (for me) requires a willing recipient. It looks a little something like this. "Hey, you, will you let me love you a little bit more even if it's messy and things fall apart and we learn things about each other in the process that we may loathe?" This feeling  is a beautiful corollary to The Expansive Property of Love. Here's what the corollary teaches me: 

• We don't know if we will live "ad meiah v'esrim" (to 120).
• We don't know if we will die tomorrow.
• It doesn't matter in the end because we will allow ourselves to love each other anyway. 

When I feel panicked by the vast task of loving the people I love without condition even while knowing that we don't know what will come tomorrow, I re-read a passage from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in which she transcribes what her late husband of several decades, John Gregory Dunne, had written of their wedding day in his private journal. He wrote, "[Joan] wore sunglasses throughout the service the day we got married, at the little mission church in San Juan Bautista, California; she also wept through the entire ceremony. As we walked down the aisle, we promised each other that we could get out of this next week and not wait until death did us part."
So for all that I get from this expansive love today, tomorrow, and until "death did us part," I give thanks, so much thanks, in fact, that it balloons and balloons without (maybe) limit.

Shavua tov,

Caroline