Love, Beyond Understanding

A few months ago, someone I love told me that they wanted to die. Not because life had become unbearable. Not out of acute despair. Not because they could not go on anymore. But from a feeling that was completely foreign to me at first: It is enough. I have had a good life. I am grateful. I am done. I want to go.

I resisted the thought. Perhaps because, until then, I had known this idea mostly from a very different perspective. From the darkness. From despair, loneliness, pain and the feeling of not being able to go on. I know that landscape. I have lived in it long enough. And I have watched someone very close to me get lost there.

So my first reaction was: This cannot be. I wanted to know what the plan was. I wanted to understand. I asked. And asked. And asked some more. I wanted to know where this wish came from. What exactly was behind it. Whether everything had really been considered. Whether perhaps something had been overlooked. I wanted to be sure. Maybe, if I could just understand it properly, I could accept it. Maybe, if I could accept it, it would become less frightening. Maybe, if I understood it, I could even change something?

Afterwards, over the course of several months, I moved through all kinds of emotions. I was angry. I was sad. I was afraid. I was frustrated. I was full of love. Sometimes I felt completely at peace with it, and sometimes I didn’t at all. And again and again, I came back to the same question:

Who am I to tell another person how and if they should continue or end their own life?

That is not an easy question. And I don’t think there is an easy answer to it. There are medical perspectives. Psychological ones. Philosophical ones. Ethical ones. Legal ones. There is our own history, our fears, our ideas about what makes a life worth living and when a life is supposed to end.

You can think about it endlessly. You can analyse it. You can argue about it. You can try to find the right perspective. You can look at life, death, freedom, autonomy, fear and responsibility from all kinds of angles. You can spend years thinking about the big questions. But when it all comes down to it, when there is actually a person sitting or lying in front of you whom you love, something remains that is much simpler than all those thoughts.

Love.

And all those thoughts become very small. Because at some point, something happens that is not longer theoretical. The situation becomes real. The goodbye becomes real. The person becomes quieter. The house becomes quieter.

These days beside her bed have changed me.

Because, now I see, more clearly than I ever could: I don’t have to understand. Anything. I don’t have to find a final answer. I don’t have to decide whether this view of life is right or wrong. I don’t even have to know what I think about it.

In the beginning, I wanted to understand in order to accept. Now I accept without understanding. Not because all the questions have suddenly been answered. But because the questions don’t need to be answered at all.

Now. I can simply be here. I can hold a hand. I can listen. I can laugh. I can cry. I can touch someone without trying to fix a thing.

I think this is what I am learning right now. Love does not mean having the same view. Love means meeting another person without reducing them to our own understanding of the world. That is the real freedom: Not having to understand. Not having to solve. Not even having to agree. Simply being there.

In love.

Not the kind of love that holds someone back. Not the kind that says: Stay, because I need you. Not the kind that tries to determine the outcome.

But a love that can simply be here.

In love beyond time and physical structures.

Photos: Marieke von Gorsel