Love Keeps No Record

What a dumb standard.  Honestly. Was that Paul? What an asshole.

I love a lot of people and a lot of people I love do a lot of wrong and I would really relish the opportunity to tell them about it. A lot.  I am an excellent record keeper and it seems wrong that God would make me this way if God didn't want someone to keep track of all the wrong shit people do.  Particularly the wrong shit people do to me!

Now my beloved will tell you that despite Paul's suggestion, my love for my husband does include a record of his wrongs.  What he doesn't realize is how many wrongs I don't keep a record of, just letting them slide away all easy-like. 

This month that husband's mom is dying.  More dying than she was before, but probably a tiny bit less dying than she will be in a few weeks. But for sure, pretty dying.  And so all of us who love her are trying to love her now in ways that matter, which mostly looks like lingery visits in her hospital room and whatever version of empathy or sympathy we know.

Everyone is doing their best.  But since everyone is a novice at the whole Mom Is Dying gig, everyone is doing it wrong.

Now you may be wondering, how do I know they're doing it wrong?  Because (of course), they're not doing it like me. Obviously that's ludicrous - they can't all do it like me, because they have to do it like their own selves. But they should be doing it the way I think their own selves should be doing it. Because that would make me feel better. 

Were I a lesser person, there would be the possibility that I was doing it wrong and that my plans for how other people could avoid doing it wrong were in fact, also wrong.  But I am so not wrong that I actually make space for this and keep telling people how I may be wrong.  They seem to think I mean it though and take that as permission to carry on doing it their own way.

Their own Wrong Way.

Now in seriousness, there are some pretty big Wrong Things that have happened over the last several weeks, even one or two by me. But in the face of death, I find myself with a tiny bit more humility (hard though that may be to believe), and therefore a tiny bit more willing to stop keeping a record. But it's just so hard, you know? Really, really hard to not want to tuck away sticky notes so that later on I can say, "But then you did THIS wrong thing and it made THIS bad thing happen and YOU are responsible for EVERY bad thing that followed!!" 

But love doesn't do that.  Love says to let it all slide away.  To only tuck away people's best parts, to only remind them of the right and good and pure and true things they did and said, and in fact, to only remember those parts.

This is the part where Jesus has to show up and do a miracle because honest to Pete (never Paul, always Pete), this part sucks.