The problem with questions like that is that the reasons for love are often the intangibles. They don't translate to words that well.

Yesterday my mother was taken directly to the hospital from her dialysis appointment because of irregular heartbeats and chest pain. They are keeping her in their chest pain unit for analysis and observation. As I write this, I am waiting for a call to find out if I should be picking her up or going to her home with Marilynn later to get her things to take to her.

Anyway, we were waiting with her in the emergency room, like I have a few times before with my mother - this is becoming something that happens every couple years now, and it worries me. She may be one of the few people I know who takes worse care of themselves than I do.

We're trying to find things to talk about with my mother, to keep her mind off of how she feels and pass the time more quickly. I am not doing a good job of it, because with distance from my family has come a division; the world I experience isn't shared with them from day to day, so we have diverged on our paths. Things I find interesting and think worth sharing aren't being well received or cause some ruffled feathers because of the gap. Marilynn is doing a much better job, but that's because she's more empathetic in general - it's her gift.

We're discussing dogs, and Marilynn says something about one of her dogs she had growing up, named Scrub. As she describes Scrub, she gets a gleam in her eye, and her face turns from concern to joy. I can see her tumbling on the ground with Scrub, him licking her face, and the feelings this elicits.

I wish when Marilynn and I played our game that I had the proper words to describe to her that this is why I love her, this is her spirit, this is what's I see. I could even hear it on the phone before I'd ever set eyes on her, and wish that I could have basked in that in her presence during those early, formative conversations.

This is what makes her so irresistible as a person - this light and happiness inside that for some reason gets hidden by the day-to-day drudgery that is everyday life. This is what I wish I could help her be every day, but am so ill equipped to do, I fear.

There is still no word from my mother. Marilynn just called, with her work voice on - must not have been break-time yet. Earlier I'd been watching a documentary on the Sundance Channel about Julia "Butterfly" Hill, the tree-sitter in northern California, who said in her movie that we should do everything in love.

Do they mean the love that tells me to take care of my mother, despite our differences and distance? Or the love I feel for Marilynn but I find inexpressible? Or some other kind of love? What are all the dimensions of this topic? Is this part and parcel of all the other things that I have thought about through time? Perhaps I do express it - she says no one has loved her like I do.

Why do I grapple with questions that I suspect do not have answers, or at least answers that can be untangled in the time we have to consider them? At least, I do not have answers.

restlessmind