My tiny sister is dancing in the living room. She is an animal in these moments, and I am moved to a place beyond happiness by the whirl of her limbs, the stomp of her heels. Watching my sister dance, I love her in ways that make me realize how abysmal I sometimes feel. I am terrified. As often as love lifts us up, pushing us to new heights of inspiration, it also forces us deeper into whatever despair has afflicted us always– whatever misgivings we carry about what it means to be alive.
The sadness of love– that the one we care for lives in a world as full of despair as our own, can sometimes be the biggest thing we are moved to feel. There is no solution to this problem of love. We can choose to simply live through it, but that often means becoming to numb, losing touch, the end of the love itself. What we want is not to live through love, but to survive it. To survive the problem of love , we must answer it with what we hope and believe. I take a deep breath, and look at my sister– her sinews and bones in delicate traction– and repeat my hopes.
In my darkest moments, when I must force myself to hope for something, I hope for her health. I hope for her health because it is the smallest thing I can hope for in a world that seems swollen many times over with ecstasy and pain.We are taught that health is a miracle, and I believe it is true– the balance of physics and chemistry that sustains us could go awry with the smallest intrusion, the tiniest tweak. In the face of how large life is, though, health often seems like the likeliest of all improbabilities because we know that, given balance, it can be done. Not so for happiness, even in the presence of abundant love.
Not so for kindness, even when survival is assured. Even the brain, our final frontier, is at least a single orb, a solid self edged on all sides by nothing. I will set my sights on health. I hope for a common sense of stasis in her liver, business as usual in her veins– dark blood going in, bright coming out. I pray that she has the chance, for some years at least, to fall back on the oldest, unaltered way of living in her physical self– that her body surrenders to the patterns that were decided before anyone could speak words like “creativity” and “desire.”
Dancing, my sister knocks her elbow against the piano and comes to me for comfort. Holding her in my arms, I don’t dare make a wish regarding her wants, or even her actions. If I am to survive my love her, I must believe that, in wishing, we do out best work in the small, in the simple. I don’t ask life to visit her with a concert of impulses that might keep her close to me– just for a continuation of the pumping and churning that hold her in the world. Happiness, I think, entangled as it is in stuff much thinner than blood, might be beyond hope.
This is not to say that I don’t think my sister will be happy, merely that the intensity of my love for her means I must take a different tack. No, I don’t choose to hope for happiness for my tiny sister. I choose to believe in it. That, after all, is what believing in someone is: knowing that they have to ability to dance beyond the outer reaches of wispy, potential hope, and, solidly, take what they want. The conviction that if we ever forget the difference between living and surviving, they will be there to remind us.
Beautiful.