Just as I was getting ready to fly home for Christmas this past year, I learned that the week before, an ex-boyfriend from two decades ago died. He was my age. We met at the Philadelphia Folk Festival of 2001 and had a whirlwind romance amidst mushrooms and a case a Chimay. How it all started was a blur to me even then. I do remember us bringing out each other’s generous affectionate natures. We were surrounded by friends, laughter, great music, childlike revelry, and we rounded out the weekend with a watermelon that had the power to make all of us feel like happy little kids again.

He fell in love with me instantly and wanted to meld our lives together very quickly. Ours wasn’t a long affair. Over the next month, in my sobriety, I came to the unhappy realization that I didn’t feel as strongly about him as he did about me. He was a sweetheart. I felt really badly when I had to tell him that I couldn’t return his love. His death made me think about my own mortality and what I would feel about my life if I died now.

Yesterday evening, I took a walk in the deepening darkness. I carried the feelings of my homecoming and his death in my heart. It was cold and wet. The song “Muddy Water” by The Deslondes began to play in my earbuds. The first few bars opened a portal to the numinous world that exists parallel to this one. I was walking with the spirits of all the people I have loved and who have loved me in this life and many others. I couldn’t see much, but I could feel them. I felt the love, and I also felt the pain of all the beautiful hopes that were shattered and could never be pieced back together.

I felt how this man who recently died understood me. He doesn’t feel hurt anymore about my inability to return his feelings. Conversely, I also felt the ones who had hurt me, and I no longer carried bad feelings towards them. I imagined them in their own lives waving to me in recognition as I passed. We had honored each other by showing up in each other’s journeys to play a part in our mutual becoming. Ironically, our mutual indebtedness set us free.

I felt my grandfather very strongly. As a child, I was very aware of and saddened by the weight of his shutdown heart even though I didn’t understand what I was feeling. Now I could feel how my ability to be with all this sadness was healing him. This song was giving me the power and the space to feel the sadness and to love it. I felt innocence. I felt freedom. My heart was happy. I wanted to live in this song forever. I wanted to understand how this song was able to make me feel safe to feel all these feelings that once overwhelmed me with despair.

I played the song on repeat dozens of times.

I felt incredibly blessed by the beauty of all this masterfully interwoven love and sadness. I looped my walk back to the park band shell down the street from my parents’ house. I stepped up to the center of the stage with all the floodlights focused on me, and I danced my gratitude for the spirits’ visitation. I don’t think any living person was in the park. It was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.

This I know – When I die, the only thing that will matter to me is the love that I gave and received. I want to live my life maximizing my capacity to give and receive love. I want to live growing into the trust that what is mine is always coming for me. In fact, what is mine cannot be denied or kept away. I don’t have to fight for the love I deserve. I just open my hands, and there it is.