I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. Not the kind of love that falls into a Hallmark category. Nor that unfathomable sacrificial love chronicled in “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs” or accounts of wartime heroics.
I’m talking about a kind of love average people like me actually have a prayer of expressing. The love that, when possessed, forever changes us and others.
Blame all this on Sally.
The birth of my first child triggered in me a transforming love. For the first time in my life I knew with absolute confidence I could and would lay down my life for another human being. Granted, I’ve never had to test my resolve. But I know with certainty it’s good to go.
Now Sally and I are planning her wedding. The series of “finales” we are ticking off — last Christmas as a family, last family vacation at Chelan — has conjured memories of being caught up in a love I had not experienced before her birth.
A similar love saw action that terrible day of the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia earlier this month.
I can’t shake from my memory the haunting words scrawled by a doomed miner who died along with his buddies: “It wasn’t bad. I just went to sleep.”
We never will know how bad it was. No one this side of God can know how frantic or resigned the desperation that set in as the air ran out. Or what the men were feeling as deadly gases seeped into their lungs and hope of rescue receded.
But in an act of amazing love toward family who waited above, one miner gave the gift of assurance that he died peacefully. It cost him nothing but was priceless to those left behind.
Ancient Greeks probably had a precise definition for this kind of selfless love. I’m content with paraphrasing Jack Nicholson in the movie “As Good As It Gets”, who speaks of a love that simply makes us want to be better people.
Sue Waldburger is a writer for The Enterprise Newspapers.
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