For years you receive little Valentines Day cards from each of your
classmates and they mean nothing. Because they're inane. And the cards
are stupid too. "Valentine, you make my heart go Mach Five!" says Speed
Racer. "Valentine, you make my heart sticky!" says Spider Man. "Valentine,
you give me congestive heart failure!" says Chris Farley. Then one
February you get a Scooby Doo Valentine from Lena McHugh that says,
"Valentine, you make my heart Shaggy!" Your friends all got the same
card, except inside yours she has written "xoxoxo." Looking at that card
makes your face hot and gives you chest pains, and it suddenly dawns on
you what all the heart references are about.

What happened that day? Was it hormones? Egoism? A delusion? I don't
think so.

For years you've been blissfully, intimately involved with one
person--someone who wasn't happy before she met you--someone who attracts
you so powerfully and constantly that the idea that you aren't meant to
be together makes no sense. She has insights into you that no one else
has. You make her laugh in a way that surely no one else can. Then one
day, seemingly out of the blue, she tells you she would rather be with
someone else.

You protest, earnestly and with increasing urgency. But you soon learn
that the matter is entirely out of your hands. Your chest hurts for
a long time after that. What was it you lost? A person? A future? A
past? No. It was love.

For years you've essentially focused on yourself: your opportunities and
challenges, your triumphs and failures. Your health. Your relationships.
Even your generosity and compassion--even love itself has a source
you've followed upstream and found somewhere inside you. Your death
would mean the end of all these things. So you press on and press on,
fearful of ends.

Then one day you hold the baton of life in your arms. This baton glows
and hums with energy and warmth, like something you've never seen yet
somehow remember from eons ago. You have a revelation: this is the end.
Your life is over. It proceeds, but isn't yours anymore, and in giving it
away you've become immortal. It's too wonderful to handle, this sudden
understanding that your path isn't flat, but round, with no precipice
to fall off. You look at the newborn in your hands and you see all
these truths, and for the first time you feel the source and purpose
of your life being gently plucked from its nest and placed outside
of you. You get that pain in your chest again. Is it an instinct? A
feeling of belonging? Simple pride in what you've created? No. This is
something more.

For years I've focused on myself, my wife, and our children, taking my
own parents largely for granted while they have kept me near the center
of their thoughts. They give to me and ask very little in return. A drop
of cynicism is all it would take for them to see me for the self-centered
person I am, but they don't. Something has blinded them, and freed me,
and kept the circle going round and round. Is it a sense of duty? Denial?
Dementia?

Well, it's a bit of all three, in fact.

It is love.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset and would like to wish a very happy 50th
wedding anniversary to his parents, who made it possible for him to
recognize love when he saw it.