Love on the Run: We don’t run a sprint the way we run a marathon.  But how do we pace our love?

I’m blessed, these months, with a precious gift I’d never wish for.  I’m accompanying a friend my age with aggressive, incurable brain cancer.  On Tuesdays I spend time with him while his wife can focus on her own needs, free for awhile from the need to care for him.

With a disease survived by 50% in the first year, my friend wants to consider himself among the 5% who survive for more than five.  Prior to his diagnosis, he’d been unusually fit and trim, finding in cycling most of what he had found as a runner when his joints were younger.   While his body is heavier due to prescribed steroids and a diminished exercise regimen, his spirit seems as light as ever.  He lives with hope and determination and gratitude.

I don’t know how he does it, how he makes decisions with this one-to-five year window.  And I don’t know how he paces his love. 

When my dad was gradually wearing out with congestive heart failure, Kathy and I would make the drive from Detroit to Chicago at shorter and shorter intervals, not only to see him, but to support my mom, who was his caregiver.  With our own kids grown and out of our nest, Kathy and I were free to focus on this relationship, and from the moment we arrived on Friday evening until we left on Sunday afternoon, we loved in a sprint.  We had that luxury.

Once while I was patiently helping my dad, he looked into my eyes – contrary to his habit of looking away – and said, “Johnny, you’re so good to me.”  But before I could process my internal response into an appropriate and honest reply, he added “Why can’t your mother be like this?”  I didn’t need a second to process this.  I immediately laughed a staccato “HA!” and watched the confusion form on his face.  “Dad, mom has to love you all the time; I get to love you for awhile and then go back home!”  He seemed hurt by that, that I found loving him so intently to require recovery.   I, sprinting through the weekend, could love him hard and strong and incessantly.  My mom, on the other hand, had to pace herself for a much longer run.

At any given moment, a sprinter is running faster and harder than a distance runner.  But the sprinter would not be able to finish the long race, exhausted well before the end.  Each different race calls for a different style of running, and each different situation calls for a different style of love.  My friend retired after a very successful career as an engineer.  Perhaps his dispassionate application of logic toward a desired end moves him to pace his love for the distance.  I don’t know.  But I am confident that if he finds the finish line approaching sooner than he now thinks, he’ll adjust his pace of loving accordingly, and sprint to the tape.

NEXT – Overloving and withdrawal