All About Love
Taking notes from bell hooks
Being in the tropics always makes me think of my father. He would walk for miles with a sun hat and sun shirt, collecting every shell he found, just to gather them together on the table and muse over just how many he was able to collect. I remember one instagram post he made while he was sick, where he posted a photo of his loot and commented “there are so many of them”. I was always in awe of how little it took to make him feel happy, grateful, lucky to be alive. Just being on the beach was enough - But never without copious amounts of sunscreen and a well-loved backpack on his back for this treasures. He was in fact an “Irish man roasting on the rocks” as well as a pirate.
When you watch someone live so vivaciously, curiously, intentionally, and fully, while also witnessing how life can be so unfair and cruel to them, it is hard to feel fear. The unfairness of it all, the ups and downs, the way that worry and despair will do nothing to change the course - you learn to accept this as how life happens. A sort of “so it goes”, and meet whatever comes with an open heart. I remember pre-mourning the fact that my dad wouldn’t be there to walk me down the aisle or attend my college graduation, but I don’t remember feeling scared. There was nothing to fear of what was to come, only awareness that life would be different.
In All About Love, bell hooks writes “we must befriend death… our collective fear of death is a dis-ease of the heart.”
I used to judge myself for the lack of despair and fear I felt, the way I was able to accept and choose to hold onto my father and his mannerisms no matter where he was. Now I realize that was not a lack of love, but just the opposite. “Loving into life and death” is a chapter about Loss in All About Love. It is a reminder that “love is the only force that allowed us to hold one another close beyond the grave”, that maybe just walking and collecting as many shells as I can is enough. Maybe covering myself in sunscreen is my way of loving into life and death.
Grief shows up through letting yourself live as much as it shows up through letting yourself feel; maybe living with love is the only way to keep someone with us on the other side of death. Loving lets us let go of so much fear.