Inverse

JD Souther recalls the moment he fell in love with her.  In response to his request to cook him dinner, she made him a peanut butter sandwich. And with it she set the tone for the relationship.

 

We opened the new year in front of the big screen in rapt anticipation, watching Souther and several others celebrate Linda Ronstadt in her 2019 documentary, a two-hour tribute to arguably the most nuanced voice of a generation; one capable of thundering and whispering in the blink of an eye. We could relate to Souther’s tale, as the peanut butter sandwich moment is coincidentally part of our love story, too.

Growing up listening to Linda, I often wondered why she didn’t write her own songs.  The answer became clear as her story unfolded.  Her gift was her voice, and her ability to modulate it, to stretch it across an incredible range of musical genres and languages; anything that captured her heart. I write about Linda like she’s gone. She’s here, but Parkinson’s disease has taken away her ability to master the very complex process she knows singing to be.

Her friends on screen emote an undeniable sadness for this loss. I can only imagine how it must feel to her, to surrender such a defining and powerful gift.  As I think about aging, I consider how, by the very act of spending a significant chunk of time on this planet, we inevitably endure loss for which there is no acceptable substitute, no reasonable replacement to fill the void. We watch people and things we value perish or expire. Sometimes it takes the loss for us to recognize just how cleaved we were to the object of our desire; the fact that we are now denied it shining a light on just how meaningful it was to us.

There seems to be this erroneous expectation that the grieving process will end.  That we’ll somehow just get over it with time, and as memories fade, we will be able to plug the hole with another version or flavor of what we had before and move on unaffected.

I replaced running with yoga when my knees and hips told me they could no longer take pounding the pavement. But my heart and my head will never get over the euphoria and freedom running provided; the clarity it brought to my mind; the peace it settled in my soul.

Losses, both small and large, gnaw at me:  Basic Grey papers, my gold standard for their vibrant, original patterns, and wildly saturated colors, unmatched anywhere else. Discontinued years ago, vestiges are sequestered in private inventories for sale if you’re willing to scour the internet and wait for delivery from Malaysia. Dallas Clayton, a beloved and influential Dr. Seussian artist, writer, and community builder who inexplicably disappeared from social media one day with no warning and took with him the daily doses of inspiration I reveled in. The knowledge that Tom Petty and Linda Ronstadt will never perform another song. The curse of timing that placed my mother’s passing before I had the chance to discover my own self-worth and truly accept the love so freely given.

    

If we start to unpack the comfort of hanging back in the fringes, the reluctance to dance at the party, to not get too close, it starts to look like a kind of protection plan we buy into as a shield from inevitable pain. We pay the premiums and receive adequate coverage, but at a considerable cost. It’s a huge miss to play it safe. It’s a huge miss to love less.

JD Souther didn’t mess around after eating Linda’s peanut butter sandwich; they moved in together immediately.  I imagine he loved hard, as it was so obvious to me by the end of the documentary that he’s never stopped loving her. 

“We are never finished with grief.  It is part of the fabric of living.  It is always waiting to happen.  Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.”  -- V.S. Naipaul

So many of us are afraid to love too hard because we don’t trust we will survive the proportionate grief. It takes tremendous courage to be all in, whether it be using our God-given talents to pursue our dreams or to love the person next to us with all our heart and soul. But maybe loving really hard is the exact fuel we need to manage the grief?