The Power of Love

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We talk about love almost entirely in terms of what it gives us: companionship, belonging, intimacy and a sense that our lives are connected to something beyond ourselves. We celebrate the beginning of relationships, the arrival of children, friendships that survive decades and the animals that somehow move from being pets to becoming members of the family. Love is so closely associated with happiness that we rarely spend much time considering the slightly uncomfortable truth sitting beside it: the more deeply we love something, the more power we give it to hurt us.

There is no great revelation in saying that loss is painful, of course, but what interests me is the strange bargain involved in caring about something that deeply. We know, even if we prefer not to think about it, that almost everything we love is temporary in one form or another. People change, relationships change and eventually every life ends. Yet very few of us respond to that knowledge by deciding we should care less. If anything, we spend much of our lives searching for people and things that matter enough to us that their absence would be almost unimaginable.

That contradiction became difficult for me to ignore recently because, within the space of a few days, I found myself thinking about love through two circumstances that initially seemed to have very little in common.

The first of these moments was when my partner, William, had to say goodbye to Lazer, his dog of fourteen years. I was in London while he was in San Francisco, which added its own particular helplessness to an already awful situation. There are moments when being thousands of miles away feels completely normal to me because travel has been part of my life for so long, and others when the distance suddenly becomes very literal. I could speak to him, check in and make sure he knew that people around him were there if he needed them, but there was nothing I could say that would change what was happening.

Fourteen years is a significant amount of time in anyone’s life. It is long enough for a dog to have been present through different homes, jobs, relationships and versions of everyday life until their presence stops feeling remarkable at all. They are simply there, a constant presence providing a level of comfort you barely notice, right up until the moment you have to imagine those same routines without them.

What made the situation particularly difficult was that the decision William had to make came from exactly the same place as the grief it caused. He wasn’t letting Lazer go because he had stopped loving him. He was doing it because he loved him enough to recognise that keeping him alive was no longer necessarily the kindest thing to do.

I think we sometimes struggle with that idea because so much of the language we use around love is based on holding on. We fight for relationships. We refuse to give up on people. When someone is ill, we talk about them battling, overcoming and beating whatever they are facing. Perseverance is usually presented as evidence of how much something matters to us - which makes perfect sense when there is still something useful to fight for. The difficulty comes when the most loving decision available to us no longer looks like perseverance at all.

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a crippling fear of death, although the past few years have forced me to confront it more often than I would have liked. And while I’m definitely not at ease with the idea of my own passing, I have found a strange level of comfort with the idea that wasn’t there before and I’ve become more accepting that sometimes holding on for longer isn’t necessarily the same thing as living for longer.

I think this is the part of what made William’s decision about Lazer feel so real to me. There are moments when love means fighting desperately for more time, and others when it means recognising that the time has come to let go.

A few days after Lazer died, William flew to Paris and we went to see Celine Dion.

There are probably very few artists for whom the phrase “The Power of Love” could provide such an obvious title for an essay, and I realise the reference is hardly subtle. But seeing Celine perform at the opening night of her 26 date sell-out residency in a 32,000 capacity venue in Paris was only partly about the songs. It was what her return represented after several years in which her health had made the possibility of performing anything but certain.

Her diagnosis with Stiff Person Syndrome and the effect it has had on her ability to sing and perform has been unusually public. We have seen parts of what that illness has taken from her, while also watching the enormous amount of determination involved in trying to find a way back to something that has defined so much of her life. Her appearance at the Paris Olympics offered one extraordinary glimpse of that, but seeing her return to a full concert felt like it reached a new level. It was difficult to separate the performance from everything that had happened before it.

The obvious way to interpret that story is through perseverance. Someone encounters circumstances that could have ended an enormous part of their life, refuses to accept that ending and eventually returns. It fits comfortably into one of our favourite narratives because we like stories in which determination wins. They reassure us that difficult circumstances can be overcome and perhaps allow us to believe that, faced with something equally frightening, we might find the strength to do the same.

I believe in perseverance, although I don’t believe that it always looks the way we expect.

One of the things recovery forced me to reconsider was my relationship with control. For a long time I assumed that strength meant being able to force an outcome, whether through determination, argument, effort or simply refusing to accept something I didn’t want to be true. Acceptance felt suspiciously close to surrender, and surrender sounded like failure. The distinction that took me much longer to understand was that accepting reality is not the same as approving of it, nor does accepting something mean you stop looking for ways to change what can still be changed.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is fight. At other times, continuing to fight can become another way of refusing to acknowledge what is already true.

That was an important distinction while thinking about William and Celine because, on the surface, they represented almost opposite responses to adversity. One involved holding on to the possibility that something might still be possible. The other involved accepting that the kindest thing left to do was let go - yet neither required more courage than the other.

Perhaps that is because courage has less to do with the outcome than we sometimes imagine.

We tend to recognise courage most easily when it produces something visible. Someone survives an illness, rebuilds a career, leaves a difficult relationship or returns to a stage they once feared they might never stand on again. Those stories have a satisfying shape because we can see where the struggle led. There is a before, an obstacle and then some form of return.

Letting go is harder to fit into that structure. Nothing gets restored. There is no triumphant final act. Often there is simply an absence where something used to be.

Yet anyone who has ever had to make a decision like William’s will know that accepting an ending can require every bit as much strength as fighting against one. Love complicates the decision because the thing you most desperately want and the thing you know you need to do can point in completely different directions. And that might be the part of love we are less comfortable celebrating.

We like love when it promises permanence, but permanence is something life rarely offers us. Even the relationships that last for the rest of our lives eventually end because one of those lives does. The alternative is to protect ourselves by never becoming too attached to anything, but I don’t believe most of us would recognise that as much of a life either.

William could have avoided the grief he felt last week by never having Lazer. That is technically true. Fourteen years earlier, he could have chosen not to create a relationship that would eventually end in exactly the kind of pain he recently experienced. But judging those years entirely by their ending would misunderstand almost everything that made them matter.

In other aspects of our life we can become so frightened of eventual loss that we start treating vulnerability as though it were a design flaw. We hold something back in relationships in case they end, avoid taking chances because failure might hurt, or convince ourselves that not needing anyone is a particularly sophisticated form of independence. There is certainly safety in that, but safety and living are not always the same thing.

This is where the idea of the power of love became more complicated for me than the title originally suggested.

Love does have enormous power, but not because it somehow protects us from difficult things. Quite often it does the opposite. It creates the conditions in which loss can hurt us more deeply than it otherwise could. The grief William felt existed because Lazer mattered to him. The emotion surrounding Celine’s return exists because performing matters to her and because she matters to the people who have spent years hoping they would see her doing it again.

Perhaps the power is not in avoiding pain at all. Perhaps it is in deciding, over and over again, that something can be worth loving even when loving it carries no guarantee that we get to keep it.

I don’t want to romanticise grief because there is nothing particularly beautiful about watching someone you love go through it. I certainly wasn’t sitting in London thinking there was a useful life lesson hidden inside William having to put his dog down. Some things are simply sad and trying too quickly to extract meaning from them can feel like another way of avoiding the sadness itself.

But sitting beside him in Paris a few days later made the proximity of those two experiences difficult to ignore. His grief had not disappeared because he got on a plane, nor should it have. Life had simply continued around it, as life rather inconveniently tends to do. And that may be one of the strangest things about loss. The world doesn’t reorganise itself around our grief. Flights still depart, meetings still happen, people still laugh and somewhere in Paris tens of thousands of people can gather in a room to celebrate somebody returning to a stage while, only a few days earlier, one person in that same room has had to say goodbye to something he loved.

Those experiences don’t cancel one another out. Happiness after loss isn’t a betrayal of what was lost, just as grief doesn’t invalidate everything good that existed before it. Maybe they belong together more naturally than we sometimes allow.

Resilience has always felt primarily about getting through difficult things, but that description gives the difficult thing too much importance. We don’t only survive because we possess some remarkable internal strength. We survive because there are still people to meet, places to go, music to hear and things left in the world that we care about.

Which brings me back to the uncomfortable bargain at the beginning.

To love something is to accept, whether consciously or not, that it can affect us. It can disappoint us, frighten us and eventually leave us grieving. There is no way to keep all the joy while somehow removing that risk.

Perhaps the power of love has never been that it saves us from any of those things. Perhaps it is simply that, despite knowing all of this, we continue to decide that loving something is worth it.