The Twin Pillars of Love and Heartbreak
The day I proposed to my then-girlfriend was one of the best moments of my life. We had just made it to Orlando the day before, and it was our first official day at Disney World.
Magic Kingdom, to be exact.
Both of us are huge Disney fans, and it only seemed right to pop the Big Question while there.
I remember the first words out of my mouth: “Sarah, I don’t want to be your boyfriend anymore.” We’d been together for seven years up to that point.
That was July 28, 2023. I’ll always remember that day.
I never want to forget it.
And now we’re set to get married in June. It’s easy to see how bright of a future we have together — and I can’t wait for the next fifty or sixty years together.
This is huge step (in maturity) for someone who previously refused the notion of marriage.
But the one day I hope never comes is the day when one of us passes away. Naturally, one of us will be left behind — barring some unlikely situation where we both die together.
I never want that day to come.
Never.
It’s impossible for me to comprehend the profound sadness and heartbreak I’ll feel if she happens to go before me. Conversely, there’s an additional sadness that washes over me when I realize that I could very well leave her behind.
No matter which way I cut it, it’s really going to hurt.
It just so happens that I’m reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning right now. If any of you know his story, it’s one that the vast, vast majority of us will have the benefit of never experiencing.
Frankl was a Jew who spent a lot of time in concentration camps during WWII. He was stripped not only of his humanity (I’ll save the horrible details), but he was stripped of those he loved most.
His father died. His mother and brother were killed in gas chambers. And perhaps worst of all — he lost his wife to typhus.
I can’t imagine the depth of pain and suffering he must have felt — wondering about his family while staving off starvation, bruises from beatings, and the crush of pessimism that whispered the ever-increasing possibility he wouldn’t make it out alive.
Most of us can barely deal with one of these issues, in isolation. But to compound them all at once — it’s a kind of existential sadism.
In ruminating about his wife, he wrote:
I knew only one thing — which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying: “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
I contend that our love toward another is made most evident by the profound pain ignited in their absence.
I hope the day is a long way off, but I, nevertheless, understand it must come eventually.
Indeed, Sarah, “Set me like a seal…”
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