Melody Beattie - The Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Live When It All Seems Too Hard to Take

Its not the passage of time that heals, he whispered. Its the passage through experiences.

I TS A FRIDAY EVENING IN FEBRUARY 1991. IM at a comedy gallery in downtown St. Paul with my daughter Nichole and a few friends. My friend Louie Anderson is doing a special performance. I listen some. Even laugh a bit. Louie always makes me laugh. Then he closes the show with a simple line, Shane, we love you, and walks offstage.

Louie, whos been with us all week, heads back to California. Nichole and I begin the forty-five-minute drive from St. Paul to Stillwater, the small town where weve lived for seven years. Its an unorthodox ending to a strange day. My son Shane has been fatally injured in a ski accident. This is the evening of his funeral.

I go home, lie down, and wonder where people go when they die. I am about to learn. Two years later, I realize that it isnt my son Shane who needs raising from the dead, as Jesus raised Lazarus. By then I will conclude that Shane is safe on the other side.

Its me that needs resurrection.

Change is constant. But the change wrought by some moments is more profound than others. Sometimes we turn a corner. Sometimes were pushed off a cliff. We arent facing our worst fears; were living through them.

This seeming fall from grace may be triggered by one traumatic incident. Or it may be a slow grinding away of passion and hope until all thats left isnt bittersweetits plain bitter. Life has repeatedly disappointed us, and we cant seem to pull out of it. Its not that our faith is weakened; its that we dont believe in life anymore.

The magic is gone.

Im a journalist, an author, a mother, a woman. The Lessons of Love is my sixth book. Its the most difficult book Ive written, the first in the intervening years since Shanes death. Its a story about what Ive learned and seen about life and love since I got pushed off that cliff.

Recently, when I was getting my nails done, the manicurist asked me what I was working on. When I started to tell her, she scrunched her face. Not a gloom-and-doom book, she said.

No, I said, it isnt.

This is a love story. Not about the fluffy kind of love. About the raw kind. The kind that makes us grow, change, expand, and move on. Its a real-life love story.

Writing it has become a profound experience, more so than I anticipated when I took on the project. Its not the mere tapping out of words, for Ive scribbled hundreds of thousands of words in my life. The problem isnt the exercise of technical skills. And, although I usually learn something about myself and life when I write, Im not writing this book as therapy, a chance to purge my emotions. I do that other ways.

The challenge I face is that writing this book forces me to embrace the ideas Im writing about. To write this book I must come fully alive, care about life, heal my own soul, for creativity is life-giving and demands that of us. To write this book, I must make the same shift in my writing that Ive made in my life, that of moving from my head to my heart.

As many of us know, that shift can be intense.

The Lessons of Love is about rekindling the flames of passion when the embers begin to cool. Its about letting ourselves see, touch, feel, and taste lifes magic again when we think all the magic is gone and probably never existed in the first place. Its about swallowing pride and fear and having the guts and the tenacity to have faith when weve been stripped of navet and shaken to the corewhen we know too well that life isnt just mysterious and unpredictable, it can be unbearably cruel and breathtakingly wondrous, sometimes at the same time.

The Lessons of Love isnt a grief book, although thats part of it, for grieving is inherently and mysteriously connected to loving deeply. Its a book about opening the heart, living from the heart, trusting the heart. Its a learning-to-live-again book. Its a story about loves ultimate and absolute lesson: that love is the only thing in this world that cannot be lost because its the only thing thats real.

And sometimes love hurts.

Its for anyone who wonders if love, or life, is worthwhile.

Its for anyone whos been forced to start over one more time.