In a little house on a bending road in West Virginia, an elderly woman lives with her cat. She is blind. Her husband has been dead two months. He was the love of her life and their fifty-eighth anniversary is coming up soon, their first apart. 

In this little house, we sit on the screened porch filled with luscious green ferns and comfortable patio furniture. A stitch work of hummingbirds watches us from the wall. Behind us, a long green yard slopes into farm fields. Beyond that, a haze of golden light rests over the hillcrest of October-touched trees. 

Wind chimes clink beneath the breeze. In the distance, the train whistles, reminding me that I’m home. We talk for a long time, because life and grief and love transcend any age. I ask her if it’s hard to still be in this house, the place of so much memory. Secretly I wonder what it’s like to lose a person after a lifetime, trying and failing to envision a future without my husband of five years.

But the elderly woman is without bitterness and utterly without fear. She tells me she’ll see him again, and this knowledge, the security of his salvation, is enough to get her through. “I don’t have to grieve like other people grieve.” After all, this life is only for a moment. 

I rock and watch the fields and she tells me about their life together. The great love that they shared. The memories sustain her, and she looks at each day they had together as if it were a gift. As she talks, a line from a Tennyson poem comes to mind, maybe trite but somehow so apt.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

As humans, we walk the cusp of that line daily, enjoying love and reaping its benefits. Devastated when it’s over. Broken when it’s lost. Perhaps a thousand times in a lifetime we might ask – was it worth it? Are the memories enough? Because loss hurts, and it’s not limited to death. 

We say good-bye to relationships and jobs and homes. We lose friendships and security. Our dogs live on an accelerated timetable, and all too soon we feel the emptiness of a house without the clack of toenails on hardwoods. Eventually, we’ll watch the color of our hair fade and the space between our eyes wrinkle, our faces merely strangers blinking in a mirror. We say goodbye to so much over a lifetime and the temptation to live in anxious dread can be all-consuming.

“There’s nothing like true love,” the elderly woman continues, drawing back my thoughts. “Nothing like it to get you through.” Her eyes seem to search my face, although I know she can’t really see me. “I love people. I like to watch how they respond to things. I like to watch God working in them.” 

She elaborates. She doesn’t walk away from a friendship when the going gets rough. There are plenty of people to throw judgment when a fellow human screws up and not nearly enough to love them through it. 

Therein lies her secret, I think – loving deeply, despite the risks. Taking no day for granted but accepting it like a gift. Loving well. Loving others more than self. Somehow giving oneself up to love and care for another makes room for more joy, more fullness, more…life. It reminds me of Jesus’s words – “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”¹

Eventually, I say I have to go, the words sticking in my throat because I long to stay here. To listen more. We hug goodbye at the door and tears burn my eyes as I take one last look at the fields, purplish shadows taking the place of sunlight. Autumn encroaching without a fight.

I wish I could bottle up all of these sights and smells and feelings and revisit them whenever I need a moment’s rest. The sounds of insects and bullfrogs and lowing cows. The lights in the windows, beckoning me to come in for dinner. There’s nowhere in the world like home simply because it’s mine. Every bend in the road feels infused with meaning, telling me where I come from. Where I’ve been.

When the road runs out, isn’t it so much better to be filled up with a lifetime spent loving? Deeply, fiercely, fearlessly. Even without sight. Even with the risks. 

Better by far to ache for lost love than it is to ache because we never had it.

¹Matthew 16:25, NLT