Love Without Want by Arianne MacBean

I have only felt love without want twice in my life. The first time was when I was invited to my therapist’s funeral. The summons arrived without surprise. Strangely, my therapist and I had talked about it, before dying any time soon was a thing either of us thought would occur. After my own mother had just received her second breast cancer diagnosis, I impulsively asked my therapist during our session, “How will I know if something happens to you? Will someone call?” Someone would call. I was on a list – a list of people to call if my therapist died.

In session, we talked through how her unexpected disappearance might go – playacting for therapeutical reasons, but not knowing we were setting the stage for a true and imminent exit. She asked me if I would like to come to her funeral. There was no hesitation. Yes. I had been seeing her for twelve years. She had gotten me through life, she had gotten me through me. Of course, I wanted to go to her funeral. Then, we talked about what would happen if I died. I asked her if she would come to my funeral. Yes. I asked her if she would give the eulogy. She laughed, “That might be a little weird.” Just two months later, she received her own gut-wrenchingly aggressive cancer diagnosis. We needed no list. She told me herself. The funeral was planned and when it arrived, I sat in the back row not knowing anyone there, listening to stories about a woman I didn’t know but knew. Because as much as I didn’t know anything about her, I knew her so fully through the way she loved me. The funeral invitation, her last selfless gift.

The second time I experienced love without want was when my best friend bathed me. I had turned fifty years old, and she wanted to do something special. As a post-partum doula, her natural talent was in caring for, and nurturing, new mothers. I was not a new mother. I was an old mother. But I was a new fifty-year-old, which was close enough. I had recently quit my job after twenty years and completed graduate school in an entirely in a new field. I was living in a new way, finally responding to the slow burning fire within me that demanded I spend my remaining years closer to true self.

My best friend came over on the appointed Friday afternoon when we were both free from kids, husbands, and other types of work. My house was quiet. While I meditated peacefully, she drew a bath. Now, of course I had bathed many times before in my tub, but never had it been drawn for me. As I stepped into the steamy basin, I noticed this difference, like slipping under the sheets of a bed made by your mother. Once settled, she handed me a small plate with a few sections of peeled tangerine, a thin slice of apple, and three green grapes. These small treats, served with such simplicity, but extravagant in their purity, were like precious gems. My first bite of the citrus felt like I had never tasted the fruit before in my life, a tiny, bursting revelation in my mouth.

My friend walked into the bathroom with a glass pitcher filled with dried blue flowers. She silently poured hot water into the pitcher while we watched the water turn blue through the glass vessel. My friend slowly poured the blue water into the bath, and I sunk deeper into a new watery world. My thoughts swirled as I soaked. When had anyone done something like this for me? Pour beauty into beauty and let me bask in it? I was in unknown territory. I let my body be engulfed by blue. Next, my friend returned with warm milk, which she spilled into the blue sea around my body, an island of flesh in an ocean of sublime. The milk turned the blue water rich and thick, my belly and knees made islets, my head an archipelago. I let it all take me over as I sunk into something for which I had no words.

Then, gently, softly, I was urged to sit up with my back to the side of the tub. Without words, my friend began to pour streams of warm milky water over my shoulders, back, neck and head. This was when it became almost too much to bear, this love being given to me. The water gliding down my body became rivers of a kind of devotion that were so full, so ancient, so selfless, I could just barely hang on to myself. Tears began to flow. How could I be loved like this, so generously without demand, without any expectation of reciprocity? My friend wrapped her arm across my chest from behind and together, very slightly, we rocked side to side while I cried, and my friend held me, skin to skin, heart to heart.

I know what those two moments were, what they still are. I wait with childish expectancy for my next love without want to appear in the same way the first two did, unceremoniously, with easy intention, with a surge of acceptance flowing toward me, into me, that I receive, hold, and let permeate my being. Love, like an invitation to a funeral or a blue milk bath of tears.

BIO: Arianne MacBean is a writer, educator, and Artistic Director of The Big Show Co. – an LA-based dance-theater group. She recently graduated with an MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and currently works as a Somatic Psychotherapist as a registered Associate Marriage & Family Therapist (License #139718) in Los Angeles, CA employed by Here Counseling and supervised by Connor McClenahan, PsyD. You can find more of Arianne’s writing at her Blog Write Big.