“Night deepens

with the sound

of a calling deer,

and I hear

my own one-sided love.”

These lines were written by Ono no Komachi, a Japanese woman poet who lived around the 9th century. It appeared in a book of love poems translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, sent me as a gift.

I wrote about this poem, which mourns a lost or unrequited love, over two years ago. I had read it lying in bed, listening to the trees shake in the wind. Looking out the window that night, it hit me that life—or God—always loved me, loved me deeply and reliably, and that I was the recalcitrant lover, the one who sometimes showed up and sometimes did not.

When did I show up? When did my eyes light up? When did I scan the lawn behind my house and feel grateful for every single blade of grass? When did I bend over the gorgeous red lily in the photo above, whose name, believe it or not, is Pardon Me Day Lily, and tell it that it had nothing to apologize for, that it was beautiful? When did I feel happy and loved life back? When I myself felt loved.

And that’s the conundrum.

Last Friday evening I streamed a play, End, produced by England’s National Theater (we don’t have much good theater here in the Valley), about a couple in their late 50s, married for years. The husband has cancer and has begun the active process of dying. He sees things ending, has little curiosity and energy for life, and wishes to stop medical treatments and be left alone.

His healthy wife, however, is very much in the middle of living. She’s thinking of her books and of their daughter, who’s soon to be a mother, and wants him to take that same lively interest. She tries to coax him out of his misery by constantly offering to make him a pot of tea.

Each in his or her own way loves the other—passionately—and they repeat the words I love you again and again. But there’s still the rub: They love each other in his or her own way.

Hospital chaplains know a lot about dying patients who wish to go, while their families hold on and on. But that’s not what hit me here. Instead, I thought of the game we call love.

When we love someone, we might say it openly. We might get up from bed and walk quietly not to wake them too early, smile brightly when they do get up and much later prepare a dinner they really like. We might urge them to come for a walk or go to the movies, we might look at their work and give an opinion when asked, we might put an arm around them and squeeze, we might volunteer to get out of bed at night and fetch a late-night ice cream treat. We might do all kinds of things to show the person that he or she is loved, but can they see or hear it? Is that how they wish to be loved?

They may do all kinds of things right back. They’ll encourage us to buy a new computer because ours is old and help us choose the one that’s right. They may ask us if we’d like a cappuccino and even make it for us. They might take us to dinner or drive us to the train, they might be kind to our family and even feed the dog when we’re too busy. But is that how we want to be loved?

So often the ups and downs of love are not about whether we’re loved or not, but about the gap between how it’s expressed and how we hear, see, feel, and experience it. Is fixing my computer an act of love? For one person it may be exactly that, but the other person wants something else, like words and tenderness.

Someone said to me: “Men want sex, women want foreplay.” Yes, there are the gender differences, but it’s way deeper and more specific than that. How open am I to seeing forms of affection that are different from my own? Can I ease my expectations of a loving marriage enough to see how much is coming my way that doesn’t meet my private criterion of love?

I remember going to the zendo one fine Saturday morning, and by the time we ended temperatures had plummeted and the roads and sidewalks were coated by close to an inch of ice. I’d promised a former student to meet him for coffee 5 miles away, but was forced to drive very slowly and when I got to the café, he was already gone.

I turned around for the long drive home, and the nightmare began. Every road was covered with black ice and many cars had fallen off, a few completely overturned. I drove north with my heart pounding, the wheel shaking in my hands and the tires developing free wheel, swerving to the right and sometimes to the left right in front of oncoming cars, threatening to leave the road and overturn.

I perspired as though it was a hot summer day, my hands wet, my face flushed. Finally, I made it to our street, with an uphill climb halfway up, and panicked. The car made it, but just as the road leveled and turned, right above our house, I lost control, it swerved hard to the right and got stuck among the tree roots. It could have crashed down the precipice below.

I called Bernie, who was in our home right beneath the road. I poured it all out, told him what happened, expressed the terror of driving a car that went every which way but straight, and most important, how scared I was of getting hurt and even dying.

“You should have come straight home from the zendo,” was his reply.

I lost it. I didn’t want advice on what I should or could have done, I wanted some acknowledgment of how scared I’d been, of the horror of driving on the road back to our town and seeing so many overturned cars, the strain of feeling on the edge of a serious accident all that time. I told him he wasn’t listening, didn’t understand, didn’t love.

I opened the car and started walking downhill on the black ice, slipping and sliding. I looked down below to the right and there he was, in his black winter coat, boots, and with his red beret, making his way up the driveway. When he reached me he gave me his arm and together we walked on the ice down to the driveway, and then down the driveway, together.

But I didn’t thank him, didn’t forgive him. He’d done the practical thing to do, but what I needed to feel loved and protected was a reflection of my own fear and careening heartbeat, some verbal assurance that he was sorry I’d gone through this, which he hadn’t given. Neither of us were great players in the game of love.

Now, years after he’s gone, this game of love continues—not with a man, but with all of life. Life loves me how it loves me, not how I wish it to love me. Today is gorgeous, tomorrow we’ll get thunderstorms, which the dogs and I dislike. I feel loved today, but will I feel loved tomorrow? I see a neurologist in the morning. Will I feel loved regardless of what he tells me? In the face of aging, in the face of death, even in the face of Trump—tell me, do I feel loved?

How easy it is to feel cynical at my 76-year love affair with life: I got this but I didn’t get that! All these years—for what? To die? It’s easy to shake one’s fists at heaven and say: If only! If only!

And yet, deep in my heart, I fully trust that I am always loved back. In a way familiar to me? In a way that meets my expectations? Sometimes, and sometimes not. I can continue to be the recalcitrant lover of the poem, someone who loves back and sometimes not, who skips a night here and there in search of someone or something better, or else I can light a lantern and peer carefully at the darkest, most opaque situations, and find the love that’s there.

Because it’s there, it’s always there. And at 76, it’s time to be the lover that shows up consistently, again and again and again.