ON LOVE IN LIFE AND IN DEATH

Rahul’s grandmother slipped quietly from this world on the evening of the 6th of June, in the year 2009. By ordinary telling, she died. But to say merely that would be to omit what truly occurred. For she did not vanish alone into that good night. Her husband, having walked beside her through the long passageways of life—through youth and ageing, through childbearing and loss, through the commonplaces that lace the days of the married—found himself, within hours, a solitary figure in a house now grown cavernous with absence.

On Saturday, he sat in a corner, rigid and still, like some ancient statue whose purpose has been lost to time. On Sunday, his sorrow found voice; he wept openly and without shame, as a child might cry for its mother. “She should not have gone,” he kept repeating, again and again, as though he could call her back by the sheer ache of his longing. By Monday, the refrain had not changed. His eyes wandered, dazed; his voice trembled with disbelief—as though he had not yet learned how to be a man alone. And by that very evening, he too was gone. But those who beheld him in death did not see the grimace of struggle or the clench of agony. No. His countenance, they said, bore the strange and sublime stillness of a man who had at last come home.

It is a common saying among the sentimental that one can die of a broken heart. But it is not only sentiment. Medical science, that ever-unfolding ledger of what the body can bear, has shown that such a thing is no mere poetic conceit. There exists a condition—Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, they call it—where the heart, upon suffering intense grief, weakens and distorts in a manner mimicking a heart attack. The brain, flooded with the chemistry of despair, alters its messages to the heart, disrupting rhythm and function. The immune system too is impaired; inflammation takes root; appetite and sleep are fractured. In short, the whole person—mind, body, spirit—staggers under the blow. It is, in essence, not only a death of the heart, but a death by the heart.

Yet the question must be asked: Is it not fitting that those who have lived in union should long to depart in union? What greater evidence to love than the soul that refuses to tarry long where its other half has gone? We are told in sacred Scripture that “the two shall become one flesh”—and perhaps, when one part is torn away, the other simply cannot remain. Love, rightly understood, is not a fleeting sentiment or a pleasant arrangement of companionship. It is a joining, a knitting together of spirits so deep that even death is not always able to unravel it.

I confess, after the shock had passed, I felt a strange loveliness rise within me. It was not a soft comfort, but something closer to awe. These two, bound by decades of joint breath and burden, had crossed the threshold together. If ever there was a picture of true unity—of soul mates, in the deepest and most reverent sense—this was it.

And then came the quieter, more unsettling question. Can such a love be found today? In a time when love is often bartered like a commodity, when affection is fleeting and fidelity is mocked as naïve, where does one even begin to seek a love that survives not only time, but death? I do not mean merely romantic fondness, which burns brightly and fades quickly. I mean the love that weathers all things, believes all things, endures to the end. The kind that turns even the grave into a rendezvous.

Perhaps such love is rare now not because it no longer exists, but because we no longer believe it possible. Our culture, awash in distraction and irony, recoils from the vulnerability love demands. But somewhere, quietly, in the hearts of the faithful and the brave, it still burns. Not loudly, not showily—but with the steady flame of eternity.

And should one be so graced as to find it, let them not clutch it selfishly, but rather live in it as one would live near the sea—with reverence, wonder, and readiness to be changed by its depths.