What Lasts

My Mom is slowly leaving us.  Her mind is wandering off.  She forgets to eat, she forgets what day it is, sometimes she forgets where she is, but she never forgets the ones she loves.  She always knows us kids when we call, and my sister and I visited last week, and she knew exactly who we were.  She remembers all about our Pop, and what a good husband he was.  She misses him.  She remembers love. 
Of all the things we have in this life, of all the things we leave behind, love is the one that trumps them all.  When I remember my childhood, I don't remember all the stuff I had, I remember all the fun I had with my siblings and with Mom and Pop.  I remember the love.  Our family isn't very demonstrative, or especially mushy, but we know we are loved.  We have had our differences, our ups and downs, and our distances, but we love each other.  Love is durable.  It can stand a few falls into the dust, and come up shinier than ever. 

When I leave this world, I want to be remembered for being loving.  Love is the best thing to give, because it multiplies and comes back to you.  I want to be thought of with love.  To achieve that, I have to be willing to be giving and loving even when that is hard work. 
Marriage teaches you what hard work loving can be.  If you learn the lessons well, you come out stronger.  Matt and I have been through many ups and downs together.  We always see it through.  We love each other.  Always.  Even when we are irritated with one another, even when things get to us, we still love each other.  Matt can nearly always make me laugh.  More than 31 years together.  Both of us are still alive.  We like that old joke: "We've never once considered divorce.  Murder, yes, divorce, no."
Working with young children teaches you about the work involved in loving, too.  Patience is not one of my virtues, but for the sake of the kids I have worked with, because I love them, I learned.  I still pray for those kids who were my one full time class. I wish I could see how they all turned out.  They all still take up space in my heart.  There are many others who have added themselves to my heart over the years. 

Friends are another source of love.  I have many.  I am blessed.  A few who are especially close, more like a family.  Some I've only met online, one or two of those feel much closer than that. 

Mom had students, too.  She touched many lives when she was a preschool teacher.  Those kids loved her, and she loved them, too.  All her friends where she lives now love her.  Even the staff where she is tell us how she has worked her way into their hearts, how funny she is, how obviously caring.  Even when she isn't entirely there. 

As legacies go, one could do a lot worse than to leave behind as much love as Mom always has.  I only hope that the ones I love know they are loved.  Treasured, even. 

Those of us who are Christians, our faith calls us to love.  Jesus was (and is) all about the love.  "Love one another as I have loved you." "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your spirit, and your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."  We are not called to judge, to see if we (or others) "measure up".  Jesus chose the broken ones, the less than sterling characters to be his disciples.  He loved them.  We are supposed to operate on the same principle.  Love.  Far too often we fall abysmally short.  That we are still loved is testament to God's faith in us, in our ability to learn and grow in love. 
I pray that we all, regardless of our faith or lack thereof, learn the value of love. That we learn to live in love, to share that love, and to leave that love behind us when we go.  Because love is the only thing that truly lasts.