Learning to love

Learning to love.
I have been told "you do not learn to love, you either love or you don't".
That's wrong.
At least for a widow/widower.
When the love of your heart & life has been stripped out of your arms, your world is shaken to the core.
You question everything from that moment forward.
Your worth. Your value.
Your abilities.

There is a rebuilding from the brokenness, from the ashes.
So, yes, there is a learning to love again.

Even in learning to love your children & grandchildren again.
Where before death you loved them as part of 2. Now after death, you love them for both - for your own heart, and for the one who died. You realize something - those children & grandchildren do not deserve to be loved LESS, just because of the loss. In order to love them for both - YES, there is a learning of HOW-TO.

​You learn to love your friends, as one.
For me, that has been a challenge, continues.
Rick & I had our "own friends", yes. But not as many as we had "our friends".
Now that I am not an "our" - well, it certainly changes the dynamics. I am trying to understand that my contact, my presence, is a vivid reminder of his absence. Therefore, being around me, even just texting or talking, has become uncomfortable. Whether it is the absence of my husband, or the presence of my grief - perhaps it is a combination of both. Either way, there is a deeper alone-ness than just being without Rick.
I am learning, sadly, that more often than I care to admit, it is better to just love someone from afar. I tell myself that people are like the ebbs and flows of the tide - some people come, some people go ... and some just take the trash out to sea.

You even learn how to love your family. As one.
You wouldn't think this would be so hard. Yet, it is.
When you became an "our", or a "we", your attention became divided. Even if you stayed in contact with your family, it was a divided contact.
Now? You aren't the same person as you were before you became a "we", yet, no longer are you a "we".
Just weird for all parties.

So, YES - we LEARN to love again.
It doesn't come easy.