Happy Ash Valentine’s Day

“We gotta go on more trips together,” my friend said to me, “we are at that age where people start to die of weird cancers.

And she’s not wrong. As I write this, I am waiting on biopsy results for one friend while also watching another friend go through her third round of cancer at 39. I am beginning to realize that while we all think of our bucolic 92-year-old grandmothers when we think of ourselves in old age, we forget entirely that they went through some shit.

Life, as they say, is short and precious. But what exactly am I supposed to do with that information? Meditate? Thankfulness journal? Bucket list trip?

And these days my bucket list is Dollywood. Just Dollywood. Italy seems like a lot of work. We’ve still got to make sure lunches get packed and phones get confiscated at bedtime.

What about those of us who are in the mire of life? I am at that magical age where I worry about how much of the internet my children have seen while also constantly wondering if I am in perimenopause. I am not meditating beyond taking a deep breath before waking up a 13-year-old in the morning. And I am thankful. But is there a way to do a cranky column alongside it?

Thankful my kids unloaded the dishwasher.

(Appalled at how they loaded it.)

Thankful I got so much work done.

(And exhausted because I got so much work done.)

Thankful I woke up this morning.

(But dead people don’t have to worry about global warming.)

So where is the passion in my life as a 41-year-old mother and wife whose big outing every week is church choir practice?

When my parents died, I went through so much stuff. Hundreds of boxes, no exaggeration. And there was a great deal of sad things. Photographs of the dead. A telegram after my Uncle Jim died in the military. Papers from my grandfather being hospitalized for bipolar depression. My garage seemed to hold an archive of family sadness. Just so much normal human sadness.

But a few times I would find things that were so overwhelmingly gorgeous that I would have to sit down with them. Top of that list for me was the dozens of Valentines my parents gave to each other.

These were not just any V-Day cards, these were sexy. There was nigh a mushy sentiment or Bible verse in sight. These cards were about getting it on with very little nuance.

The cover of the card might be two parrots hanging out on a perch together and one says, “Want to hang out?” to the other parrot and when you open the card it says, “In bed?”

Their office desks were full of them. Which broke my heart in the best way.

These little cartoon sexual advances were one of my favorite things I found because I knew what their lives were like they were sending them. My parents were self-employed which my mother often described as “feast or famine living.” They waited 10 years to have me and 8 years later to have my brother. Which meant they parented small children for a remarkably long amount of time. And they fought a lot, as married people do.

Their lives were just as complicated and overwrought as mine is now. Yet somehow across the dark chasm of marriage they were able to call out to each other with cartoon parrots.

This year Valentine’s Day happens to fall on Ash Wednesday, a day when we are reminded of the brevity of life. But it is not a call to live life to the fullest. It is a reminder that God gave us one another to love for this short time we have been given.

Ash Wednesday is not so much a call for us to seize the day as it is to remember death. Our own death for certain, but also the deaths of those we adore. I still remember getting weepy the first time I saw an ashen cross drawn onto one of my children’s foreheads, with the promise that they too were dust and to dust they shall return. It was jaw droppingly sad. But also, honest and beautiful.

There is relief in this holy reckoning with our finite nature. It frees us up to love a little bit more. To take ourselves less seriously. Which feels like an anecdote to the grievous demands the world shoves our way.

Ash Wednesday is also our reminder that death does not have the final word. God does. So not only is our existence not nearly as permanently important as we think it is, but death, yes death, gets taken down a notch.

And if we take that promise seriously enough, we can find freedom there.

So, if our battle cry is anything, it is to love a little bit harder. Forget your New Years resolution. Italy is for retirees with pensions. You can meditate and be thankful when you are dead. This Valentine’s Day, get your person a sexy card. I prefer parrots.