Love is a REALLY powerful. But is it's strength really that useful? 

I don’t know. Romeo and Juliet killed each other. Didn’t they send a whole army of ships after Helen of Troy? I hope she was worth it…..

 I feel so defeated saying this, but I must confess. I have let people get to me.

 I have let the worst possible people get to me. I have let them ruin a fundamental part of who I am. The part that believes in love. I am  at that point in my life movie where I want to chuck the bottle into the sea and never look back. Literally. Please God don’t send that troublesome two-timing lying bottle flowing back……

 What if it’s just too overwhelming for me? Maybe I’m like a child who gets given chocolate/sugar for the first time. I’m that child who got that sugar rush and run around the house for a full hour afterwards. It was just too much for me!  I can’t anymore… I don’t know how to be patient, and hope I figure it out.

Either all my cards are on the table or they’re not… I don’t know how to bluff!

I am not a poetry expert or that much of a fan but I feel poetry should speak to your soul. That quote speaks to  MY SOUL. It makes me sing gospel like Aretha Franklin in my head … so I had to place it somewhere. Please bare with me as I chop, dissect, mold,  pound and cook the ingredients of this story into a lovely meal of a blog post  for you. Forgive me for the sad aftertaste, I have  yet to discover the right kind of seasoning to disguise it.   

When people ask me about grief, I often tell them about the strangeness of losing my mother.

I remember us. When I say us I mean my siblings, their wives (soon to be), their children, and family friends who I consider siblings all hurdled up in the masters bedroom upstairs, looking through family albums.

Theses albums were created by my mother. She always had a camera. ALWAYS.  Do you remember those cameras in the 90’s? The one which required you to carefully roll out part of the film. Do you remember the rewinding sound? Do remember how you had to try so hard not to touch the film? That was my mum….. always prepared to capture that moment; to capture those memories for the  albums. It’s really a wonder she never became a professional photographer. I mean she knew nothing about technology in that way, but she certainly enjoyed taking photos of the people she loved. 

So there we were all hurdled together, a day after her death looking for photos to put in her funeral book. You know the one that has the order of mass, the hymns, and a short bio of  the deceased? Yes, that one.  I am not sure how this odd moment occurred but somehow it did. All I  can tell you is that grief is strange.  Maybe it was my mother’s spirit upon us , who knows?  She always loved bringing people together. She really was the quintessential definition of ‘ home’. Anyways …two minutes into looking through the albums, we started recalling the stories behind these captured moments , and before you know it we were laughing, the fresh mourning tears were still streaming down our faces…but we were laughing. All those happy childhood memories came flooding back, including the awkward moments where our mother would pull out the camera and chase us down till she got her photo.

As we flipped through the pages, pulling out our favourite photos, I had one of my famous epiphanies. 

It was really special. 

My heart is smiling as I write about these next few sentences. 

I figured out what my mother's legacy was.  

Her legacy was LOVE

It was LOVE. 

It will always be LOVE.

My mother’s legacy was her ABILITY TO LOVE. She LOVED hard and she LOVED strong.  I don’t know anybody in my life who can LOVE like my mother did.  That’s what they said at her funeral. They said her heart was too big. They said people could wrong her and she’d still be there. I don’t know whether they wanted to give the impression that it was her weakness, but it stayed with me. People failed my mother. People knowingly failed my mother multiple times. I feel like the world was always telling her to seek power, to be vengeful, and ditch people when they misbehaved. She couldn’t. It wasn’t her nature. She was loyal.   Lord knows she should have been treated better by those around her, and they know it too. Yet they want to make it her mistake; they want to make it seem like she was flawed in that way.

When I look in the mirror, I see her. I see her cheeks. I see her lips. I see my mother’s vulnerability staring back at me.   I love all those things about my mother, but  I wonder if they are things I need to change in myself. I don’t know if I am as strong as her .  I hate that when I break up with  a boyfriend they never truly leave my essence. I still love them despite all that they are. Which brings me back to the question that I asked earlier……. Is the power of love really that useful? The world keeps telling me that Love doesn’t win

Love.  Doesn’t.  Win.

I need to pack up my favorite fairytales and romantic comedies, the ones that I had stashed away to share with my daughter someday. It’s time to give them away.

 I am so sad I am coming to this realization.  I have to throw away that part of me that that was holding on to ‘love wins’. Is it a just a concept? An idea that was constructed? One that stayed with us for centuries until we thought it was true, like a really good myth, a story some grandma told long ago.

There is no happy ending to this story, except maybe the fact that I was able to write it, and now hopefully let it go.