More Love Than We Could Even Handle
I've hardly known what words to put on our experience over the last month. But I think I finally figured it out.
My dear friend Tim Hansen from high school, who volunteered to design the funeral program for Emma’s funeral
It has often been said in accounts of people who nearly die, but come back (“near death experiences”), that they experienced more love than they had ever experienced before.
This is one of many patterns noted in research on near death experiences across 50 years. In addition to this common experience of profound love, people often describe seeing people they love. Those are two themes that stood out to me in the near-death analyses available.
I’ve always found this interesting, especially after watching multiple loved ones go “all the way” (“full death experiences?”) - including my brother, my mother, one of my dearest friends, and all my wonderful grandparents. And now my sweet baby girl Emma.
But my interest in this has still mostly been akin to an appreciation of what someone else is experiencing - like relishing (from a distance) unique kind of pleasures neighbors report from an exotic vacation they are enjoying.
“Really neat…sounds amazing…can’t imagine how wonderful that would be.”
To this point, that’s how I’ve related to my loved ones who are deceased (while very much still alive) - regarding them (and their experience) like it’s happening on the other side of a veritable China Wall: impassable and impossible to replicate.
Then the last month happened. As I remarked in the funeral address:
Texts, emails, meals, flowers, and hug overdoses. Three of you have written songs for Emma. We’ve had a drive by lawn mowing, boxes of fruit taken and returned all cut up, and more emojis and tender notes than we can count. One of you even insisted on shining my shoes this morning. I find myself wondering - what do others do when they have to grapple with grief like this, but without you?
For all the nasty stuff we say about social media, the support we felt on there online was simply remarkable. Say what you want about its misapplications and abuses, Facebook seems to have (almost) been made for these kinds of moments.
Have you ever been loved so much that you didn’t know what to do with that much love? We had never experienced that before, and didn’t even know how to metabolize all that love.
Monique’s cousin Lauren Moore
In fact, after a few days of that, we needed some space. Like a rarified kind of food, our emotional systems seemed to need some time to absorb it all.
So, we got away for a few days to the condo of Monique’s dear cousins Mike and Erika, just so we could focus and settle. We felt a need to absorb not only the loss and separation of this one dear being, but also the profound, counterbalancing intimacy of so many others we had felt.
In the very moment trauma rendered us unable to feel, others had felt for us: surrounding us undeniably and tangibly till we were able get moving again.
I’ve been searching in my mind for the words to make sense of what we have experienced. “This has all been incredible,” I told Monique one night, “but doesn’t everyone need the same kind of love?”
This two weeks ago, it finally clicked. This intensity of love that we had never experienced before, reminds me of another love I had also never experienced before: the love that awaits us beyond death.
In a very real way, it feels like we’ve experienced in recent weeks what everyone can experience one day1 (and which we’re getting small glimpses of here and now).
A future day when relationships are not only restored, but glorified. As Joseph Smith taught in 1843, “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.”
Even while anticipating this greater fulness to come, the coolest thing is that we can get as close as we can to it here and now (check this out). And we are practicing and rehearsing together what will one day become beautifully permanent - a veritable incubator for a heavenly, Zion community to come. And in that, we are experiencing an anticipatory witness and shadow of what will one day glow in fulness.
Notes:
Although we Latter-day Saints see this as available for everyone in the bright future day - it doesn’t come automatically and universally. Those who actively hurt, abuse and deceive will see and experience something very different, as attested in both scripture and a subset of near-death experiences where people do not report that love and connection. It matters how we live in life - and how we treat others and truth itself.