Lear and the Lessens of Love

A friend, in a heartfelt email, asked “Why do you two have to be so far away?”  I mused that we are better, in a way, at a distance.  At a distance we become our ideal selves.  

We take time to read each other’s words…and never interrupt. We reflect and reply out of the stillness that allows us to sit with their words.  And we incarnate them from their words, seeing their faces as we reply.  With repeated such exchanges over time, we begin to habituate this respectful, reverent exchange.

My friend has lost two husbands and a son, and is leaving to spend time with her daughter whose mortality is brought far too close by a recurring brain tumor. 

Distance of geography, distance in death; we have been reduced to love,  and that blesses us. 

Perhaps grief is the soul’s winnowing, the surface imperfections of those departed – in death or geography – gone on the wind; their essences brought into clearer relief, they can be our truer companions.

Actor Frank Langella spoke of learning from playing King Lear that as things were stripped away, his Lear became “lighter”.  Amid the tragedy of loss, he found Lear – and himself – feeling some relief of the burdens of life at its fullest.  And like Lear was loved by his daughter Cordelia not for his power but for himself, Langella was moved with gratitude for his own daughter, who “from her birth” loved him simply because he was her father.

Langella discovered in playing Lear that letting go was a relief.  In his aging, he began to see the beauty of a process of leaving life with nothing left, embracing this "lessening" as a source of joy.

I pray for that same joy in my friend, that we who are distant feel present with her in our essential goodness and love, as we share this very human process of lessening.