My mother has dementia. I’ve found in her condition a reason not to feel sorrow, although that feeling is there, or to call for advances in medicine to provide a cure. I have no desire to partake in a walk for the cure.
What I’ve found, rather, is a new way to wonder at the largest reality about life: our lives are about creating love. To the extent that we create love while we’re here, we succeed. To the extent that we create chaos and hate, we fail.
This is an obvious, even childish observation. But when I visit my mother, who is 84, and listen to her talk, the one thing I notice is how much her talk revolves around love—how much she loved my father and he loved her, how much they loved their kids, how much she loves her friends and neighbors. It’s as if love is not an abstraction but something, like the movie Interstellar posits, that is a tangible thing, something that can be created in the way fire or smoke can. It’s as real as the screen you are reading this on, and it is common to every culture. It is our purpose, what brings us into existence and what we celebrate at our end.
Creating love is not easy. While love is often unruly, crazy, and uncontrollable, the family and the hard work done to preserve it over time is the foundational place where love flows most powerfully. The breakdown of the family over the last fifty years has made it difficult to create a culture of love. Children from broken homes tend to be distrustful of commitment, and boys without fathers who love them act out in gangs or other problems. Girls who don’t receive genuine love often get caught up in drugs or pornography. People without love or with broken hearts can die from it. iPads can’t create love. Neither can drugs.
Friends and beauty and art can inspire love, and even bad families can be more about jealousy and hate than love. But the family remains the deepest well of love, the template that can set the pattern for an entire life and that can determine whether a person will be capable of creating love themselves. It’s about much more than sex, a hippie shibboleth was long ago displaced by common sense.
My parents did everything to create for us a word of love, from the schools they sent us to and the trips they took us on to see the world, from the art they inspired us to experience to the community of neighbors that became extended family, from the advice they gave me about dating nice girls to the books my father made us read. His favorite was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s masterpiece he and my mother saw all the things that generate love—beauty, friendship, family, place. What sustains Frodo on his journey to Mordor is love, his love of his home, the Shire, his love of his friends, and of his Uncle Bilbo.
At the end of The Lord of the Rings Frodo travels to the Grey Havens, a seaport, and sets sail for “the undying lands.” This has been interpreted as a journey to heaven. But Tolkien experts have noted that the undying lands are a place where Earth has not been touched by decay. It’s a place to go before death, a holy land where the deep scars Frodo has received in life can heal.
With her watery eyes and soliloquies about love, my mother has entered the undying lands. Her memory is not good, but her grasp on reality is fine. She’s like Van Morrison in “Madame George,” praying to “the love that loves to love, the loves that loves, the love that loves to love, the love that loves.”
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