I paused only enough to exhale into the stillness of the space.
"Absolutely," I replied. "What else is there if not that? All I have to do is look around me. This moment, this chance meeting, you two sitting here sharing, opening up about our lives, our joys and heartbreak; the five incredible kids I was blessed to raise, the community surrounding me, holding me when I can't seem to catch my breath, even in the excitement of my dogs when I enter my house. Think about your adult children, your utter delight in taking care of your new grandson together. Love surrounds you, it surrounds all of us. Love enabled me to create a family and home, as it did you. I know love exists in all its various forms. I feel it in the beauty I see all around me, in the joy I experience over so many little things, even in the very depths of loss and pain and sorrow. Love held my family when my brother died, as it did you when you lost your son. Without love, could we have survived it all? Perhaps, without love, none of those other raw experiences could even exist. Love is all around us. This is God's gift."
She and her husband sat quietly. He leaned in, "It's just that....we have been struggling. We are not sure if our marriage can make it. We don't know what to do."
The bartender turned off the lights. Last call was long gone. The three of us remained, cradled by our stools, by the intimacy of this moment.
"What do you think?" he asked.
I looked at them both. Tenderness filled me and a longing to take away the pain and hesitation between them stirred within me. Yet I knew it was not mine to carry.
Slowly, words came back to me and I offered them this. "I am not an expert. I don't have all the answers, I wish I did. I can only say this: the thing that shatters me, the thing that fills me with such aching sorrow and dread that I have wanted to simply crawl under a boulder and let the weight of it crush me, is the recognition that later on, I won't have the opportunity to sit with my spouse, the one I have vowed to love and whom I have walked this life with, the one who was with me in the very creation of our family, and share in the storytelling of memories that we alone have together. There is no replicating or replacing that shared history with someone new. I will never have what you have: the shared joy of entertaining our grandkids together, of retelling our past together with the next generation, of enjoying each other's company with the satisfaction of knowing we did our job together well. The splitting of time with the people I love the most, my kids, and hopefully, one day, grandkids, is gutting."
"But you will be okay," they said, half reassuring, half questioning.
"Yes, I will be okay. And so will you. Because love comes in many different forms."
The conversation lasted into the night. She told me about their unmet needs and desires and expectations. He shared of his fears and frustrations. They let down the exterior they had been hiding behind and spilled it all out in front of me, hopeful to find some morsel to hold onto. And it occurred to me that it was the hopefulness itself that was the morsel to hold onto.
****
I have been told that my superpower is that people, even complete strangers, will open up to me, almost immediately, and want to share the intimate details of their lives. This is a blessing and, at times, a curse. Yet in this season of my life, I am so grateful for this gift. I am so grateful for the love and vulnerability and depth of humankind. It is so hopeful and perhaps that hopefulness is a morsel we can all cling to.
****
"After everything you have gone through, do you still believe in love?"
Absolutely.
