AUG 10 — I recall the time my grandmother was rushed to the hospital. It was 1998. She was in Singapore — Mount Elizabeth Hospital or some other elevated place. Everyone was saying she could pass away any time. So I took a flight down.
From the first time I heard about her attack till the moment I took the cab from Changi Airport (straight to the hospital), I was all "cool." No tears, no trembling, no anxiety, no nothing. I was almost proud of myself. I was sad, but in an "objective" way.
Then I reached the hospital — I’m still cool as ice. I went inside, and easily found her ward, I saw her on the bed. She was sleeping — I’m still cooler than a frozen cucumber in the North Pole.
Then I held her hand... and all façades of coolness were blown away.
I cried like Niagara’s twin brother. I wept like a tsunami had burst through my pancreas and out my eyelids. Nurse had to call the plumber. I must’ve sobbed so much my granny woke up.
The experience taught me two things: 1) that overpowering feelings of loss can be entirely beyond my control, and 2) that this was hardly a bad thing.
Love & loss
Alfred Tennyson said that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Agent K was pissed when Agent J quoted this to him (in the first Men In Black movie); K’s pained response was, “Try it.” Novelist Jeanette Winterson responded with a question that defines her works (one which I borrowed for the title of this piece): Why is the measure of love loss?
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan attempted an answer: Love is failure.
Love is that which causes us to fail, to falter, to go awry, to stumble. Love summons that part of us which hasn’t yet been "assimilated" by our system of social obligations, protocols, requirements and rules.
Love brushes away those stifling peace-masks we think we need to wear to survive; it breaks down our need to be "professional" or just disgustingly poh-lite all the time.
When we love someone, we’re allowing this person access to that part of us we know we can’t quite control.
One of my ex-colleagues bragged that when he proposed to his wife, he did it most casually and without feeling, “Hey — marry me, okay?” It’s like he was ordering another mug of beer. At first, I simply hoped he was joking. But as I know for a fact that he loves his wife, I’m confident that what he said wasn’t true.
It’s psychologically impossible for true love to appear like a World Wrestling Federation fighter bragging to the mike.
If you want to know if a love letter is sincere or not, check for the edits, the re-writes and the mistakes. If he loves you, what he wrote would read like a complete mess... that means he’s writing from the lack in his heart that you’ve awakened.
Remember those amazing opening 15 minutes of Up, that Pixar movie about the old guy with the zillion balloons, and how he lost his wife? Hands up those who cried (for the rest, what’s wrong with you?). The sublime thing was how the lead character not only failed to fully love and understand his wife, but how his love took the form of misunderstandings and fumblings.
It is not that there was an "ideal" of love which the man failed to live up to. It is that his failures, stumblings and mistakes demonstrate how much he truly loved his wife.
Our "other halves"?
True love is that traumatic core in our hearts seeking to reach out and play havoc with the world for the sake of the beloved. There is a fissure in all of us, a "hole" or "gap" at our core which can never be filled, only stirred by yearning. A loved one doesn’t so much "fill" that hole; s/he merely touches it, affirms it, connects with it.
Jerry Maguire’s famous quote, “You complete me” is at best a mushy-feely half-truth and at worst complete claptrap. I’ve got nothing against the popular quip about our spouses being our "other half" — heck, I even like the saying. But that doesn’t mean I agree.
I don’t believe love resembles two halves of a donut, once separated, and now having come together. No. Love is more like two bent-out-of-shape waffles, forever trying to come together, to give something to each other, and no matter how misshapened an entity they keep producing, these two unsightly treats never stop wanting to be together.
We can never be "completed", and this fact drives us to love. Loving is like words; no matter what we say, the full essence of reality can never be captured, yet all the more why we must keep saying. Unless you’re just ordering a pizza, your words will never exhaust the world you live in.
Likewise, we can never find 100 per cent "fulfilment", and that’s what keeps us always on the move. True love is not the perfect dance of perfect partners. True love is an awkward jig between two imperfect amateurs. We’re offering something we have no power to give, and receiving something for which we have no right to ask.
Showing love, knowing loss
Love is failure, it’s a kind of vulnerability. Love is, in fact, a kind of loss. Without loss, there would be no desire. Without desire, there would be no life. So love… is loss… is life.
This also explains why, when our loved ones suffer, a part of us hurts deeply, too. It is not so much that we are agonised because someone we love is in pain. That is undeniably true.
But a deeper truth could be that our sorrow unexpectedly reveals to us the depth of our love for the person in the first place. My tears — which sometimes shocked even me — are a surprise revelation to my own heart of the very gap that this person has touched all this time. I weep not only because I feel I cannot deal with the loss of this person, but also because the knowledge that this person has so shared my life and love in a special way, is too much too bear... and this causes me to love him/her even more.
We cry because we love. We also cry because we now know how we loved and how much we’ve been graced by love. The deep unbearable pain of losing loved ones mirrors the oceans of joy they have imparted to us with their love.
Maybe this is why some people are afraid to care — there are doors in their souls they’d rather not open. For these folks, a final reminder: If we’re afraid of loss, we’ll never love. And if we don’t love, we won’t live.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
