Valentines and ashes: A memory and a blessing.

When I fell in love with the man who would become my partner in life, I was struck by a vision that was as unsettling as it was profound: a glimpse of myself standing at his graveside.

A snowy Valentine for you, AF 2024.

Dear fellow traveler,

One might expect a flurry of joyous moments and dreams of a shared future when falling in love. Yet, I strangely had this vision of death and ashes that both frightened me and affirmed the love I was about to embrace.

I was warming up in the car after a frozen winter walk from Gooseberry Falls to the tectonic plates of ice on Lake Superior. We had ventured far north from the settled plains, a journey that Americans seem to treat as a mere day trip, while we Germans would reserve such distances for extended vacations. As we sat in the silence of the car, the memory of the falls' frozen cascade lingered, a testament to nature's quiet endurance. It was there, in the contrast between the bright glance of sun on ice and the stillness of the car, that the vision came to me—uninvited and transformative.

But let me start from the beginning:

Once upon a time, I dated this American college professor, a man who stepped into my life when I was done with men. I had actually been thinking a monastery might be a better place for me,  and it turned out he was attracted by monasteries too. We were both done, heartbroken, still longing, and fully immersed in our research topics, when we ran into each other in the church at St Olaf College (of all places), hidden in the vastness of the upper Midwest. A friend introduced us, thinking that I, coming across the ocean to work on my PhD thesis at the renowned Kierkegaard library and he, the quirky introvert psychology professor teaching undergraduates would have something to talk about.

I will spare you the intricate details of the unlikely, but entirely typical, romance between the odd full professor and the aspiring PhD candidate.

I did not care that much that he was almost 20 years older. Nor did he. We did not aim to fall in love. We just meant to have interesting talks about God and the world, evolution and the trinity, and personal stories of discovery and enlightenment.  At some point we felt our cherished resignation about romance begin to crumble. The guys I dated before were either too religious or too smart (as in too brainy but no soul, or vice versa). I apparently could not find a man who possessed both deep spirit and deep intellect. I wanted more than simply religious and more than just smart. It had to be someone deeply engaged in that intersection, who embodied what he believed but knew what he did not know (I guess I set high expectations).

So, in these first months of getting to know each other (carefully tiptoeing around calling it dating), we drove long Midwestern roads while exploring a profound inner landscape.  It was indeed a Minnesota winter, about this time of year almost 20 years ago, with vast expanses of cold and snow where the roads disappeared underneath the drifts into an unbroken white horizon. The waterfalls in the hills along Lake Superior were frozen in full flow, and we hiked behind them like explorers. Neither of us were used to this sort of winter cold, and we were grateful for the plentiful sun and the evolving, shared love warming us in this arctic ice field.

When we ran back to the car, hearts stilled by the prodigious beauty of the landscape, with the warmth of the car and the tea from the thermos welcoming us back, there was quiet moment as we waited for the heater to get warm. It was then that I had the vision: Me at his graveside. Just a flurry of a second. It hit me so hard and so deep I turned my head so he would not see my tears. While I was looking out the window on the passenger side, he buckled up and started rolling the car from the parking lot. My tears were streaming down quietly. There I was, the young existential philosopher grown up in former East Germany, falling in love with the psychology professor from the deep American South, both now immersed in the deep winter of the American north. Far away from any home. The vision was not so much a warning as it was a validation of the gravity of what was tenderly growing between us.

You know those moments when transcendence breaks in because we are overwhelmed by beauty? An ethereal landscape or music? A deep conversation? This moment was so laden with beauty that my awareness of its fleeting nature came with an existential shock: certain knowledge that the deeper the love, the deeper the pain will be when we must part.

Falling in love is perilous. It confronts us with the impermanence that commitment summons like a ghost: the inescapable truth of our mortality. This love will not be forever. If we love deeply we will loose deeply. We will lose the one we love to the vicissitudes of life and of death. We cannot hold him, we cannot keep her forever. Where love will take us is fully out of our control.

Years later, as young love has matured into married life and all its ambivalent complexities, I sometimes wished I had not fallen so deeply in love there in the Minnesota woods. That I could simply walk away from this intercontinental and inter-generational marriage (and this country of naked emperors and school shootings and all) and start over again, back home. Where ever that is.

So much loss comes with deep love. So many ashes are needed to mark them all on our foreheads. So much disillusionment, and pain, and recognition of failure.

Love often quits when loss knocks at the door. I have been asked by more than a few aspiring colleagues at conferences what I did after receiving my PhD with highest honors. You did what? You moved to a little college town where? And yet, I did. I have often regretted it deeply.  I have always stayed. There is no perfect love and no love without compromise. Love confronts us with our humanity, with our deepest fears and sorrows, with our limitations, with our vulnerability and impermanence, and yes, with our death.

To my dear friends here still grieving the loss of your partner. I know that “still” is the wrong word here, as though the pain would one day end. I see you and I name you in my heart. The widows and widowers, the one left behind and the one who needed to leave.

I sometimes wonder if all the difficulties we faced were in part because I was too afraid of loss to allow us to be fully content. A simple solution. Perhaps, and here I offer you my very personal struggle, perhaps the loss, the end, will not be so hard if I do not love him so deeply? And so I held on to that possibility by dreaming of how my life would have turned out elsewhere. Jungian psychology speaks about the allure of the unlived life.  But of course, not risking the deepest love also risks having only a diminished love to set against the losses that will inevitably come.

Frozen shore at the Lake Superior, AF 2024.

The received wisdom today is that love should not ask for compromises. We instead watch people leave their marriage when first love has grown stale. Being unhappy, making compromises, struggling through,  all this somehow contradicts our idea of self-fulfillment and growth.

But this is a half-hearted approach. An approach that does not want to see the ashes on our forehead. There is no deep love without loss. We lost the possibilities that we both would have stellar careers. We have lost each other often, and we have lost love often, and we have lost children in utero who will never grow up to dance playfully by the long lakes in Bavaria. We have even lost the concept of a home as we struggled to find a together home.  We have sometimes wondered if perhaps a third country might ease that pain. Our love has longed for time and for retreat and for non-doing.

Love demands a reshuffling of priorities. (It is always a delicate balancing act between both lovers. Who is the one who leaves behind their home or their career? For too many centuries that question was not even asked, and women silently gave in.) Career, travel, personal ambition must make room for love’s arrival. And even that love cannot be the ultimate, for it too is but mortal.

As you see, while writing this, the mingling of the ashes and our love has begun to make more sense to me. They so much need each other. Each, at the very end, fares badly without the other. Life cannot thrive only in ashes, it must rise from them. Love cannot ripen in a fantasy, it must be grounded in fragility and mortality. Deeper love starts when first love dies. Deeper love matures when we fully recognize its vulnerability, its mortality, - and that we could walk away from it (without this freedom, it cannot be love either).

Years ago, falling in love reminded me of being mortal, of the pain which will come when we lose what or whom we love. Philosophically spoken, it put me right at the abyss where freedom and anxiety intermingle. Do you want to leap into the unknown or stay at the safe, desolate shore?

Love is a gift which does not keep on giving. We must renew it time and again. If we do so love reminds us of our being human, stretched out between our mortal body and our eternal soul. And even if we might loose the beloved the Divine gift of love goes beyond it. I know that many of you already know this more deeply than I.  And still, I often wish the abyss away.

But my child keeps reminding me every single day. When I kiss her goodbye, I also pray, “Let her come back to me.”  Being a lover teaches you to pray, to take part in t great love which comes to our consolation: please keep them safe, please bring them back, please let this surgery go well, please let me cherish love again.

With growing love, Almut (with Chuck and little one)

PS: If you can, leave a heart, a word or a line which resonated with you in the comments, so we know you have been here :-)

Or let us know a moment when for you love and transience intermingled.

Beauty and cold intermingle at the shores of Lake Superior, AF 2024.

A Blessing for you

After reading and editing my piece Chuck has written this blessing for you, inspired by Rumi:

I should not wish you pain or loss
but I hope you find love.

And loss will follow it
like a stray dog on a long journey,
trailing always just out of reach,
wanting to lick your hand.  

You, then, must step out on the pilgrim road of love,
knowing it will not rescue you,
but will instead sweep you away
unwilling to holy places.

May you have eyes to see them
and ears to hear the whispered
words of mercy found
when finally you welcome
the kiss of that stray dog.

Only on that pilgrim road
is there safety for your soul.

CH 2024

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About Almut

Almut Furchert, Dr. phil., Dipl. Psych. is a German American scholar and practitioner, a psychologist turned philosopher turned writer, traveler, photographer, retreat leader and mother of a pre-schooler. She has taught and published on authors like Kierkegaard, Buber, Frankl, Yalom, Edith Stein, and Hildegard of Bingen. Almut is also a Benedictine Oblate and lives with her family in a little college town in MN.

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