I am thinking strongly tonight of a friend who is honoring the first anniversary of the sudden death of his much loved wife. I am also in constant touch with another friend who is in the first months of living into the unexpected death of her husband of 30 years.

I remember when I was trying to get over love, not for a spouse who had died but for one who had decided to move on, telling my students in a college classroom that I don’t know what love is. It felt to me at the time like a disease a person needs to be cured of. How do you find healing for this?

At some point I finally realized that love is fatal. You don’t get over it, you live into it and everything it asks of you. It slays you. It destroys your life. And opens your shattered heart to the universe.

We don’t choose love, it chooses us. We can hide from it, avoid it, create boundaries to keep it out, but when it hunts us down and finds us watch out. The heart is in for another piercing. Floods of universal powers move in to break down the flimsy dams, to devastate and re-create all at once.

To my cherished friends living with the diagnosis I say, surrender. Your former life is fertilizer for a greater cause.