Blog 2339 – 03.20.2022

Love Makes The Hard Choices

Sometimes the most loving act may not appear so at the time for indeed love sometimes has to make the hard choices. I never cared much for “tough love” programs, but love can be tough from both sides and often is.

We all, at least most of us, have experienced loving someone who did not choose to love us back, and that is indeed a tough situation, but far tougher is having to make decisions regarding a loved one or for them that they might misunderstand as “mean,” “hurtful” or “uncaring” when the total opposite is the intention.

In one of my wife’s and my favorite movies, “What Dreams May Come” the loss of a loving mother’s two teenaged children at once in a terrible car crash sends her to a mental rehabilitation center. Her child psychiatrist husband is at a loss for how to bring her back for she blames herself for their deaths because she let the housekeeper drive them to school the morning of the accident. She irrationally believes her mother instincts would have somehow prevented the car crash had she been driving.

We are all guilty of at times entertaining “magical thinking.” In the fairytales “true loves kiss” always awakens the sleeping princess. In real life it takes a lot more that even the most ardent or magical kiss. Love often makes the hard choices. It was the threat of divorce that stirred the lost in her own thoughts mom to wake from her self-imposed nightmare to be herself again for her husband. When he tragically is killed running a last minute errand for her in another traffic accident a couple of years later in her grief she commits suicide and in the story suicides are doomed to a hell trapped in their own delusional guilt.

The deceased husband, in his own heaven created from his wife’s paintings, enlists a tracker to help him find his wife. The tracker tells him that this journey is just so he can find closure and let his wife go, that nothing he says to her can bring her out of her delusions. And that if he tries too long that he too is in danger of losing himself in his wife’s irrational world. It is his choice to stay with her in that nightmare rather than leave her that awakes and frees her. It is a beautiful love story as is today’s song, What Makes You Stay.

Some believe such a love is “crazy.” In a crazy world the hard choice of continuing to love, continuing to hope, continuing to believe in the best outcomes no matter what, certainly may seem insane, but then love always makes the hard choices.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TO_4yTWkyDT_lqX7-BVOAa7tk8zXeoCk/view?usp=drivesdk

What Makes You Stay