Somewhere in the gauzy forests of the past each of us has left a bit of our heart, a small red poppy in the underbrush no one else knows is there. We never forget the loves we lost. Those memories can take many forms: the fuzzy nuzzle of a pet, the touch of a tiny hand walking home from school, the petrified joy of hearing baby’s first sniffle, the final smile of a dying spouse. Many loves weave the fabric of a life.
Lost love is a paradox. On one hand, love is always being lost. On the other, love is never lost. As Helen Keller wrote, “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose…. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” After all, “the only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.” (Bruce Coville). Losing a love diminishes you: you lose a big part of who you are. Losing a love makes you greater: you grow in ways you never imagined.
Love Is Always Being Lost
Change and loss are the color of reality. As Marcus Aurelius says, “Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity.” Indeed, “the way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost” (G.K. Chesterton). Even while love lasts, we are always losing it. Because, if it is real, it changes as we change. I’ve loved my wife for over 20 years, but it has not been the same love. It deepens and grows and changes like sunlight flittering on a wet road, steady, but an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of hues and nuances. Like all things, one way or another, love comes to an end. Some loves end in breakup or disillusionment. Others endure. My parents were together fifty years. Still, death ended their marriage. Loss is the currency of human life. Seneca says you will find love again, the way fallen leaves regrow in the spring. But it will never be the same.
Real Love Is Never Lost
Dylan Thomas reminds us that, “though lovers be lost, love shall not.” James O’Barr wrote “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.” First loves especially always keep a special place. Some people sometimes feel that is where their lives should have gone, where they really belong, as if their lives after the breakup were a wrong path, an intriguing detour. First love is often identified with youth itself. In the opera La Boheme, the bohemian Mimi is dying of consumption and her friend Colline sells his coat to pay for medicine. Colline sings an aria of goodbye to the coat, but it is really a goodbye not just to Mimi but to youth, for things will never be the same. When he walks through the threshold of the garret he is walking into adulthood. “Lost love,” says Nicholas Sparks, “is like a river that once flowed strong but has now changed its course, leaving us stranded on the banks of our memories.” We can picnic on that riverbank over the years, returning less and less frequently in the busy years of life, more often as the years turn gray. Epictetus says when we lose a loved one, we should focus on what we had with them. Their loss should leave us with what Lincoln called “a sad, sweet feeling in the heart.” When my father died, the pain I felt was immense. But it was a good pain, a warm pain, because I felt so vastly lucky to have had forty years with such a parent. It was a pain born of goodness.
Lost Loves Diminish You
When we lose someone we have deeply loved, whether through death or breakup or circumstance, we lose a part of our lives, a part of the world, and a part of ourselves. Neither we nor the world we grow into will ever be the same again. Theodore Locke points out that part of who we are is our relationship to other people. So when we lose a loved one, we lose a part of ourselves. Grief, he says, is a response to this “metaphysical injury.” As Jocelyn Soriano says in Mend My Broken Heart, “We hurt so much because we have lost a part of ourselves.” Margaret Atwood captured this memorably: “a divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.” Grief is also a response to a diminished world, a world without her laughter or his jokes, a world without her touch, his smell, without their quirks and insights. Life becomes smaller. “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night” (Edna St. Vincent Millay). And we lose what could have been. Regret is the bridesmaid of lost love. Simone de Beauvoir wrote “When someone you love dies, you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.” We mourn all the worlds we’ll never realize, the words unsaid, the chances not taken, the thoughts unspoken, the moments not shared.
Lost Love Is an Opportunity
But a lost love is not only a door closing on a lost garden. It is also a door to a new field. As I said to a friend long ago, after your heart has been broken, it never completely heals. But you come to realize, over time, that its new shape, far from being deficient, is capable of new things you never imagined. Yes, there will always be a gap, a path to a life that could have been, a world that might have welcomed you. All lives are incomplete in this way. But Aristotle said that possibility is the form of actuality, and these could-have-been lives give shape to the life we actually lead. All that we might have been and all we might have done form part of the logical space in which our lives unfold. They are flowers that bloom only in our imaginations, but they photosynthesize the sunlight of ideas and nourish us, help us grow. What I shared with my first love in high school, Roxanne, is but a fond and distant memory. If I met her today, I have no clue if we’d have anything at all in common. I have moved on in a thousand ways in the twenty thousand nights that passed since last our lips have touched. I have an amazing family whose love fills my heart with joy. But Roxanne will always be a part of who I am. The shape of my footprint today, even after walking a thousand steps down a thousand roads, would be different had I never met her. In this way, a love is never lost. It continues growing in the disconnected lives you both lead going forward. Memory can be a prison. Memory can be a dusty warehouse. But it is also a greenhouse, full of warmth and sunlight, in which, despite the cold and snow outside, the tender fruits of the soul can grow.
Three Dimensions of Loss
And so, losing a love has a past, a present, and a future dimension. We miss the past, of course. Sometimes you change. Sometimes the other person changes. Sometimes circumstances change. Sometimes death intervenes. But lost love can also cause retroactive pain when it casts doubt on what we thought we had. “You never loved me” or “you were never the person I thought you were” is harder to bear than “you no longer love me,” for it makes us doubt our future ability to perceive and see clearly. We can no longer trust ourselves and no longer trust the future. When love is lost, the present can seem intolerable. Nina Guilbeau writes “I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don’t know what to do with all this hurt right now.” When your heart breaks, says Dickens, “you think you will die, but you keep living, day after day after terrible day.” And lost love casts its shadow into the future. “Being in love shows a person who he should be,” wrote Chekhov. In losing a love, we may feel we also lost this picture of who we should be. We’ve lost the instruction manual to a better self. Lost love means a curtailed future. “Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be” (F. Scott Fitzgerald). If you lose a lifelong partner to death, it may feel like everything after they die is just an epilogue. “Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you” (Ranata Suzuki). But life chitters to us like birdlings in a nest, calling for us. Lost love can bring a richer future. As Ethel Parsons says, “something does not have to end well for it to have been one of the most valuable experiences of a lifetime.” Lost love can “[push] us to rediscover our own worth and find love in unexpected places” (Sarah Dessen) and “lead us to find a deeper love within ourselves” (Elisabeth Gilbert). Sylvia Plath realized that she will never be broken “as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
A lost love is a green tragedy, a moment of grief and pain and growth and promise. Even as we lose the half of ourselves, we find the whole of a self we never knew, seed heart in the cut fruit, growing quietly in the soil watered by tears.
A Final Thought
Relativity shows us that past, present, and future are all still here. Since what is past for me can be the present in another reference frame, my past cannot have vanished into nothing. It is not my “now,” but it is someone else’s now. Since what is future for me can be present in another reference frame, the future must already exist. The human mind can access the past only through memory and causal effect and can access the future only through prediction. But your past love remains as much a part of reality as the flickering of the screen as you read these words.[i]
[i] I’m espousing a “moving spotlight” view of time: past, present, and future all “exist” as a block of spacetime (eternalism), though for each of us there is a “now,” the present, that moves through the block. This does not mean, as is sometimes said, that time is an “illusion.” Temporal sequences within a light cone are real sequences. It does not mean there is no present. Although the present is different for different reference frames, each one is real. To read more about this issue, see Sam Woolfe, David Ingram, or the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Disclaimer
Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.
