HOW MUCH LOVE CAN A HEART HOLD?
“There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Taken from The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 113 Essays, First Series
“Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.” Zelda, May 22
Found in a calendar “Each Day A New Beginning” published by Great Quotations Publishing Co., Glendale Heights, Illinois
How much love can a heart hold? How much emotion? How much love? How much pain? How much sorrow? With love, all things are possible. Does that apply here?
One day I did a freewrite on this topic, which appeared on a flip calendar I’ve had for years, since days when I first attended Al-Anon meetings. A freewrite is a writing practice taught by author Natalie Goldberg. This means you write for about 20 minutes without stopping, without putting down the pen or pencil. Do not cross out things or edit or rewrite but simply open your mind to whatever appears on the page. I was surprised at what I discovered once I dropped the pen and read what I’d written.
I’d written that the heart was just an organ that pumped blood through our veins and love was really an emotion better connected to the brain, the mind or consciousness. Emotion was more of a frequency. The heart helps when we exercise, when we need stimulation in the toes or fingers. The heart is responsible for keeping blood flowing throughout our body. The heart can cause pain during a heart attack or anxiety attack.
I think people write about the heart in terms of love or affection, sorrow or pain. Love is often drawn in the form of a heart and associated with the heart in our body. The only pain I have felt in my heart is from anxiety, or when short of breath in exercise. Sorrow has brought pain, but I don’t think the heart can take responsibility.
I was so surprised by my writing discovery that love and emotion really come from the Mind, the brain, and our consciousness, I did another freewrite “How Great is Our Love?” This came out as follows:
About a year and one-half ago, my husband of 35 years was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He will be 90 in September and in general is a patient, quiet, calm, devoted husband. He tells me he loves me every day, rarely lets a day pass without saying this. This is especially poignant for me since my first husband (20 years) never could tell me he loved me. Each time I delivered one of our three children, I would think, “Surely, he will tell me now that he loves me.” No. Never did. Therefore, I relish being told every day that Rich loves me.
I met my first husband in 1962 when we were both in journalism school and he courted me by showing up at the school’s library, where I often studied. He would appear with an umbrella when it rained and escort me to my sorority house. My parents had made it very clear that I was to get a college degree and then get married soon after. The idea was that I would probably not need the degree and would never work outside the home but should the marriage fall apart, the degree could be handy. In fact, it saved my life in many ways because neither of my two husbands ever supported me without my help. The first marriage was violent; my first husband was a raging alcoholic before I even married him, but I did not realize this, nor did I have any indication he would hit me after we married. I divorced him after 20 years, a divorce that took six years to accomplish. I would file for divorce, then decide I loved this man too much to leave, plus we had three children together. Finally, the lawyer I’d had throughout the six years insisted I go through with it when I filed the third time. Few people have ever spoken to me about the violence. My parents, my brother and sister-in-law never spoke to me about it. I was made to feel that I had disgraced the family when my marriage failed. Fortunately, I had earned that Bachelor of Journalism degree at the University of Missouri Journalism School in Columbia. I married six months after graduation but was thrilled with my degree and wanted to work, and I did work in that field in full- and part-time jobs for 20 years. Many of my sorority sisters also ended up working while married. My parents were correct to include the degree as a back-up plan.
By the time I finalized the divorce, I had sorted out many of the problems in my marriage. I’d found Al-Anon, and been friends for three years with the man who became my second husband. Somewhere in the latter part of those years, we fell in love and my divorce was final. We will celebrate 36 years this month. Following my second marriage, I also returned to graduate school, earned a degree in Creative Writing (pre-MFA) and continue to write, poetry, memoir and historical.
When I married my present husband we had seven children between us, a few grandchildren on his side, but today Rich has a family of 30 people. I still just have my three children, no grandchildren. This has required stretching my capacity to love, whether it is in the heart or the consciousness or a frequency. And I have stretched my love to include my four stepchildren and their seven children and then spouses and their children, the great grandchildren who now number ten.
I have learned what it can be like to have such an immense family but be disliked in general by all of them simply for the sin of marrying their beloved father and grandfather. I understand. I wouldn’t have wanted to share my father with a second wife and her children either!
I also expanded my love in consciousness to include friends of my children, mostly high school friends, and one who struggles with spina bifida. During my children’s high school years, during both marriages, our family on occasion took in a friend or two who lived with alcoholic parents, or arguing parents, or needed space and other people to use as parents temporarily.
During my years of a second marriage I learned what it could be like to inherit money, more money than anyone else I knew. I tried to share that good fortune with my children and some members of my husband’s burgeoning family. Eventually, I could not maintain the sharing with so many, and had to draw back and prepare for our own retirement but I still try to get Christmas presents for everyone or at least a gift for each family.
At the end of my parents’ lives, I also experienced expanding my love to help my brother care for our aging parents. For eight years I flew back and forth from Seattle to central Illinois to help care for Mom and Dad who lived to be 93 and 96. After that ordeal, I wrote my book, Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir. After my mother died and my book was published, my son, my brother and sister-in-law all stopped talking to me. I felt sorrow but realized I could keep on loving them anyway. No apologies necessary. And I was okay. I discovered a love for myself. I discovered that I liked myself. I was proud that I had survived a twenty-year alcoholic marriage, written three books, had spawned two incredible daughters, writers themselves. I’d held wonderful jobs in writing, fund-raising and public relations. I’d even established a public relations department for a 500 bed hospital in St. Louis in the late 1970s, early 1980s. I could continue loving people who expressed great dislike for me or even stopped communicating entirely.
My love was great enough to keep loving all of them.
All of this has been aided by the fact that my present husband, Rich, continues to tell me he loves me every day. And I have expanded my love to embrace his aging with patience, understanding and forgiveness despite his stubborn refusal to use a cane, my insistence that he keep exercising, and his insistence that I continue to cook his dinner meal every day and serve it between 4 and 6 p.m. He also sews on his own buttons, something he is doing as I write!
I do not always balance this well. I must keep myself in a good place, maintain my health and stay centered with things like exercise, yoga and swimming, walks, so that I am centered with who I am, and meet at least some of my own needs. I have joined groups to help me cope with my husband’s aging as well as my own. I have taken over all the driving, scheduling of my husband’s ten doctors and their appointments and the pick-up of five prescriptions. I pay all the bills, cook most of the meals and clean our two homes. I also read a lot of books and do a book club, a counseling session, and am part of a poet’s group, all of those on Zoom.
My love has expanded to include all of that.
During the years since 2018 when I wrote my book Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir, I have also relooked at my mother’s apparent dislike for me and come to see this in a different light. I have become aware of how much she DID love me, how much she wanted me to succeed but to leave my small Midwestern hometown, to go out and find a life of my own, new people, good jobs, discover many places to live. She offered a pretty stiff shove out of the nest because she believed I could do more than she did—and I have—and I know she would be proud of me.
So now I’d like to challenge my BLOG readers to write their own freewrites about love and the heart. I hope you will share some of these with me. Just send to my Gmail address, parsingwithsusan@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing your ideas about love and where it comes from, how you use this special emotion in your own lives.
TWO SPECIAL BOOKS I RECENTLY READ AND RECOMMEND:
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Somehow by Ann Lamott
PHOTO CAPTION
One of the ways I sustain and refresh my love is to visit a piece of property with a cedar forest and a beach that my husband and I acquired in the late 1990s in the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle. Here we originally camped, then brought an RV up for many summer trips, until we could build a modest retreat home where we live alongside deer, eagles, ravens, otters, gulls and sea stars. Winter nights we often see the Northern Lights glow green above Mt. Whistler in Vancouver, Canada. This is a good place to rest and restore our capacity for love.
