Can I Tell You a Love Story?

The tale of a mother, a pitchfork, a batch of warm scones gone cold, and an aneurysm...

I recently read Love Stories, by Trent Dalton. And when I say read, I more mean this: I let every word sink deep into my bones, I hung onto every syllable so tightly I think it’s permanently changed my DNA. After hearing story after story about loves that don’t need sight, and the heartbreaking kind of love that never leaves once they do, I think it’s time I tell my own love story. So, I ask, can I tell you a love story? This is the tale of a mother, a pitchfork, a batch of warm scones gone cold, and an aneurysm.

This isn’t the kind of love you see in the movies, or the kind you see sharing coffee & kisses in Paris. It’s probably not the first kind of love you imagine when I say ‘love story'.’ This is the once-in-a-lifetime, lottery, golden ticket, kind of love. This is the kind of love that if you were one of the lucky ones to hold it, you simply knew to your very core that it wasn’t going to come around again.

I want to tell you about a love so deep, that her notes app was filled with lists of new friends, and places they liked, and their favourite food, and their coffee order. This is a love that paints the sunset you witnessed together onto watercolour paper, and then gives it to you just so you could savour that small glimmer in time. This is a love rooted so firmly, that when the storm came, she let her branches bend, and sway, and dance, in the wildness of the wind, because she knew she wasn’t going anywhere, other than wholeheartedly right into this very moment.

This is the kind of love that remembers, the kind that doesn’t need a Facebook reminder that it’s your birthday, or even your Auntie’s birthday, she just knows. This is a love that sat graciously, night after night, into early hours of the morning, for a year straight, while her insomniac daughter shook with the anxiety of sleep.

This is the only kind of love that wakes at dawn, on her final conscious day on earth, to bake scones for a friend’s daughter’s birthday. The only kind of love that wakes on her final conscious day on earth to muck out a horse stall in Arizona heat with a pitchfork. This is the only kind of love that could have had death greet her as she was on literal bended knee, with servant heart overflowing.

How do I know this love, although so rare, you ask? How do I know that it is a once-in-a-lifetime, lottery, golden ticket kind of love? I know, because I was the winner of the lottery. Though life and death, heaven and earth seperate us, this kind of love remains, regardless of distance, and regardless of matter of aliveness.

This is the love story of a mother who watched her daughter dance with a dark death, and the note in her phone simply said “I can’t fix this for her, but I can remind her every day that she is loved. And I will.” This is the love story of a mother, who knew her daughter’s voice so well, that when it penetrated her comatose state for one final “I love you,” her heart rate fluttered, a final wave of knowing, a goodbye that is tattooed on the mind for a lifetime.

This is the love story of a mother, a pitchfork, a batch warm scones gone cold, and an aneurysm.