I was thinking, half awake, half dreaming, how much I love my mother. The thinking became feeling, intense and radiantly glowing in the darkness of my room. I love my mother with all my heart. She is the most selfless person I know.
A darkly inevitable thought crept in, whispering "She's going to die, you know. Death must be paid its due." It's true. One day, she will die, and so will I. The sun itself will die, for that matter, and each of us will have to bear the pain of loss as the grave reaches out to embrace us and all those we love. Our light must go out, the candle burns for only so long. Death, and the potential loss of meaning, is a fact of existence.
Is the intense love I feel for my mother an equally valid fact? Or is it the warmth of an ember soon to fade long before morning comes? One day, death will take me as well as my mother, and keep taking until no one remembers that either of us ever lived. Whither then my love? Has it dispersed, evaporated into the emptiness of an indifferent universe?
No.
The fact that I love my mother MATTERS. It matters as much as the law of gravity, as much as the drifting of galaxies, as much as the promise of sunrise. It is an energy as of yet immeasurable and enigmatic to science, generated in our hearts and woven into the unseen fabric of the continually unfolding universe. Our love is the color in the tapestry. Love is just as important, just as inevitable, every bit as much a fact.
Love too must be paid its due.
I hold this in my heart as the melatonin takes effect and I drift away. I love you, mom.
