Over years all of us have become habituated to loving and receiving love through physical exchanges with the people we love. Giving gifts, massage, making love, going to a restaurant or concert. It is no wonder we come to associate loving with the body.
For 34 years I had related to Shera through the daily interactions I had with her–physical interactions. However, although I loved her body, it was not her body I fell in love with. It was her personality, her vitality, her drive and creativity, her sense of humour that I had fallen in love with…the special qualities, characteristics, idiosyncrasies – all non-physical — that made her who she was.
As much as we may be attracted to someone’s physical appearance, it is is not actually the body alone we fall in love with. That’s why, when we speak of the essence of who a person is, we do not mean their body. That is why, as the body of the one we love ages, wrinkles, weathers, and grows ill, or becomes handicapped to the point it in no way resembles what it once was, we do not stop loving them. Rather, the love we feel for them continues, and can even grow and deepen. It is not the body that we love. It is merely the vehicle through which we have become accustomed to channelling our love to our loved one.
At the moment of someone’s passing, we lose the vehicle through which we have always expressed the love we feel. The body has is done and returning to the proverbial “dust”. Yet the love and compassion we feel and want to give is undiminished—and perhaps even greater than ever. In an instant, all the love we feel has nowhere to go.
Because of death most people feel have lost the only way they thought they could love someone they care for deeply. It is understandable that this disorientation and despair can flip the blocked feelings of love into feelings of grief and abandonment and loss.
Grief is love with nowhere to go. It is, in part, a product of our belief.
However a loving relationship can continue in a new and meaningful way when the body–the physical–is gone. It simply needs to be conscous that the loved one is now an enrgy being and our love must now be felt in alternative, non-physical, expressions of energy.
Love never was physical. It is an emotion. It is the expression of energy. Energy does not die.
