[Yup, another Valentine-y re-post.]
With its random bandaids, Tie o’ the Day represents love and the pain love inevitably causes us. We’ve all needed to heal our hearts when they have been broken. If we allow ourselves to love, our hearts will break many times while we live. Family members and friends pass away. Our pets meet death. Maybe someone we fell in love with fell out of love with us. Maybe we lose hope, and our dreams die.
If we choose to, we can empathize with each other’s broken hearts, because most kinds of losses happen to everyone. If they haven’t happened to you yet, they will. We’re part of the human race, and our lives follow similar trajectories. Birth. Relationships. Work. Aspirations. Death.
Loving is worth any pain that might accompany it. A broken heart is often the cost of a full heart. And broken hearts can be instructive. We have the power to look inside that broken heart at all the mistakes we made which caused the heartbreak in the first place. We can learn from those mistakes, and we can get a little better at the practice of love.
Two months after Mom and Dad graduated from Delta High School, they got married in the Manti Temple. Dad had barely turned 18, and Mom didn’t turn 18 until two months later. They were youngsters. Nobody should get married that young, in my opinion. The odds of a couple that young—and, therefore, that dumb—staying together are miniscule. Mom and Dad somehow found a way to kick the odds and stick together. They lasted 59 years together before Dad died, in December 2007.
Dad suffered horrible, constant pain for the last two years of his life. He stayed with us for as long as he could—for all of us, and especially for Mom. During the last two weeks of Dad’s life, Mom often told him it was okay for him to let go. She told him she would be okay. She told him we would all take care of her. Dad knew we would. But I believe one of the reasons Dad held on for so long is that he was trying to make it another few months, to be with Mom on their 60th wedding anniversary.
Of course, no matter when Dad died, Mom’s heart was going to break anyway. And when he finally did let go, her heart did break. Thirteen years later, it’s still broken. But Mom’s heart is also still full of memories and time and the adoration Dad gave her. It’s impossible for that kind of splendid stuff to ever fall out of even the most broken heart.