How do we love, yet better the question; how well do we love? Eight weeks have now slipped by since the passing of my wife Leah Cecile. This time alone in the now silent world of my existential existence has allowed for much reflection on this thing that we humans call love. Aside from the obvious and often painful journey one will experience with the loss of a loved one. There also comes a period of quite reflection in which one replays their days before their loss and questions the true depth of their love.

It is during this time that one begins to notice other couples and their actions. Often the same couples that have passed my way for years without notice, but now they stand out like brightly lit neon signs. These moments of recognition are surreal in that they play out as some sort of dreamscape within the confines of a living world. It is during this time that I started noticing the various degrees of love and unfortunately degrees of odium for one another. Having been so wrapped up in my own life with the love of my life, all these things went unnoticed in the past, but now they screamed against the silent backdrop of reflection.

I began to wonder and question, how do we love, or better yet how well do we love. Do you as a husband or wife become bored or even agitated when your true love begins to tell you of their day, their thoughts or their hopes? Or do you give that person your complete attention and respond by validating their thoughts? If you answer yes to the first question, then from an outsider’s point of view it is time to reevaluate your commitment. I don’t say these things to imply that there is no love within, but only to exemplify the importance of loving the one that you love with your all. Emily Dickson once said…

“Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without words and never stops at all”.

The same is to be said of love; it perches deep within the soul and it makes it sounds by the actions we take toward another. I have had time now to see many things and if I were to ever say anything that could ever be deemed of worth I hope it would be this. Our lives and our days under the sun are minute when weighed against the vastness of eternity and should not be squandered with anything less than absolute love for one another.

For love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends.” 1^st Corinthians 13:7-8

So now we come back full circle to the question of how well do we love? Does your love for your wife, husband or significant other carry with it the traits of commitment or devotion? When you are apart for reasons of work or their duties do you find your hearts thought on that person, or do you find the temporary separation a relief? Bottom line is; do you love with all your heart and soul? If not then there is still time to take action whilst one still has their loved one with them in the physical world in which we live.

I write this not as a letter of condemnation, but as a letter of reevaluation for those who should wish to hear or see that this journey here on earth is so brief and that we should in our all make the best of this journey through a total commitment to the ones we do love. Often we find ourselves so caught up in the aspects of everyday living with our jobs; our children’s activities or our desires for our own personal space that we somehow let the opportunity to nurture what we still have slip away before our very eyes.

For when it all comes down to the final days; when our time under the sun draws nigh, it is not the number of cars or houses that we possess, but rather of what we have done between that first breath and our last. I write this as I said from a point of reflection; as a spectator of sorts on what I see in the world around me. I have loved and I have lost; I have seen both the good and the bad. I still live and I still learn and now only wish to share and encourage.  The author Anais Nin once wrote…

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

Therefore it is my hope if you have taken the time to read this piece to its conclusion that you will perhaps sit in quiet reflection and introspection of oneself and make your commitment to the one you love an ever stronger one. For even in this and after we eventually lose the one we love and hold so dear, there will still be regrets. It is my hope that through evaluation and a stronger commitment that they will be few. I will leave you with this from poet Lord Alfred Tennyson…

“I hold it true , whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”