I Would Die for You: Love and Sacrifice in Arizona

One of the stupidest things I’ve said about someone I’ve loved is that I would “lie down in traffic” for them. I was drunk at a college party and explained to my best friend’s girlfriend that I’d be willing to give my life for him. I remember actually feeling proud when I said it. I’d never thought in terms so fatalistic before but a new layer of hyperbolic conviction was opening up. “I must be maturing,” I thought. This is what adults do for one another. They die for love.

A few months later he got in a fight with a couple of guys on the ski team because of some inappropriate jostling of someone’s girlfriend. I sat and watched. I’d lie down in traffic for him but I didn’t want to join a backyard fight over someone’s girlfriend to keep his head free of a few lumps.

There are only a few times in my life where I might realistically have died, and a couple that I know happened but don’t exactly remember. When I was 22 I was stuck in a robbery and spent ten minutes with a sweaty-browed teenager and a Tek-9. A few years later I spent a night on a small boat in the storming Indian Ocean hanging onto a worn strap that held some timber to the deck.. I’d hooked my right arm under it and kept it flexed all night to keep from slipping down into the agitated black water that would come up almost to the soles of my shoes in every sloshing trough. Another time I got so drunk that I don’t remember driving home from the bar afterwards.

I had malaria before my first birthday, and when I was born I didn’t breathe for several minutes because some bit of placenta had gotten stuck in my throat. The doctor had no idea what was happening. My mother–a nurse–saved my life in the early morning delirium after spending all night in labor by figuring it all out and clearing the tissue with her finger.

Amidst the bramble of reports grown out of the shooting massacre in Tuscon last week is the story of Dorwin Stoddard, a 76 year-old man who dove to the parking lot pavement to cover his wife Mavanell. She was shot in the leg three times and survived. He was shot in the head and died ten minutes later.

It’s impossible for me to absorb the details of the shooting. But out of the rhetorical thicket I feel a surge of guilt and shame when considering Stoddard. I won’t speak for him as a person, but the record of his last action survives him and it sticks in me painfully.

I’ve come to realize I know as much about love as I do death. Love is often treated as some universal reference point, a great North Star that guides pop stars, lovers, and puppy dogs in the quest for optimal living. We probably lie about love as much or more than money.

The last time I fell in love I began to suspect it’s a synonym for death. I had never felt the kind of contentment I felt in those moments. I recently discovered a batch of old pictures from my time together with her while moving some old files onto a new cell phone. There’s a photo I took of a poster in a toilet at a karaoke bar that I thought was funny; a shaky closeup of me wearing her sunglasses in bed; one of the Golden Gate Bridge from a day we spent at the beach; a hazy black close-up of me wearing one of her scarves as an ascot.

It’s absurd to find in those scraps of color and digital noise anything worth holding onto, and yet I was sure in the moment that my life had reached its perfect apotheosis. Everything I had ever wanted was there in a toilet at a karaoke bar.

Fear of death–and the wish to postpone it–circumscribe human civilization, and yet none of us can say death will be a great mystery. We come from it and we will return to it. There’s a justifiable anxiety about how painful the exit might be, but the arms of emptiness that wait for us can’t have changed since flicking us into existence a blink or two before.

Likewise, it’s silly to spend a lifetime looking for love, hoping for it to arrive while sounding other people to test the firmness of their own love. There is no purer way to love than whatever it is we already know by instinct at birth. Every subsequent relationship is an imperfect negotiation with time, opportunity, and faith. Which I suppose is why I feel so pained by the record of Mr. Stoddard’s end. It seems like an act of someone who’d held onto more of what he started with than I have.

One dark thought that accompanied my perfect contentment in love was came in a realization that I might be capable of hurting someone who threatened my beloved. This instinct seemed antithetical to everything I believed and so I ignored. It was an ego fantasy, and it scared me. This was no longer a mimetic pledge to sacrifice myself, but instead a threat to sacrifice someone else. My love was so strong it might move me to lose control should some skulking evil-doer threaten us in an alley. It was a boastful threat made from love, a disfigured animalistic thought that pinged against the back walls of my psyche.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian and editor, wrote that forgiveness is the final form of love, the thing that saves us from whatever delusions of self-valor that we hold onto. As we age, the accumulated plaque of belief–and the fights it inspires–degrade us.

You haven’t really been in love if you haven’t looked at someone you loved and said you’re sorry. You haven’t honestly loved until you’ve good reason to say those words. And there’s little hope to hold onto whatever is left after the awful transgressions we’re capable of if you can’t believe there’ll be someone who’ll receive your apology. And forgive you.

*Images via Jaynamana

**Arizona Shooting Victims