That was what had been happening to me in the months after my mother died.
All the love I had for her, all the care and attention and tenderness, was still there, with no one to receive it, and it had curdled, inside me, into the stone of grief that would not lift.
When I held the hand of a dying man who had no one, I was not being a saint, whatever it might have looked like from outside.
I was giving my stranded love a destination.
I was taking the tenderness that had nowhere to land and letting it land on someone who needed it, and in doing so, I was easing, just slightly, the terrible pressure of love with no object.
It did not bring my mother back.
It did not fix the grief.
But it let the love flow again, out of me and into the world, instead of pooling inside me into pain, and that flowing was, itself, a kind of healing.
