Love

Love is defined as "a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection" at dictionary.com.  While this is listed as definition number two, it is the meaning I want.  Love is a feeling.  A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection.  A simple yet eloquent description.  There is no additional specificity, no rules, no strings attached.

Love is not defined by any person, in fact it doesn't mention anyone at all.  It is a feeling experienced by one person.  It is not measured  in telephone calls or visits, there is no amount of minutes or hours which can solidly constitute "deep affection" or "warm personal attachment".  The absence of counting or tallying up those minutes or hours probably signifies a deeper personal attachment or affection. There is no list of people whom we must love or should love or even cannot love.  Only we can make those choices.  Because we feel them.

The warm personal attachment or deep affection lives within me, it is mine.  Because of this, it is so easy and so hard to love.  I love Wyatt and Eli every time my heart beats, even when I thought it was irreparably broken.  I've loved Wyatt every single day of the 3,161 days I have lived without him and will continue to do so until I don't have to live without him and Eli any longer.  This is perhaps the purest sense of love because they are not here.  Their deaths have wounded me so deeply and their absence stings so strongly.  There is no earthly word or action that can affect the love I have for my sons.  That is the bitter and the sweet.

A heart in the big blue sky above, sent from heaven by two little boys I love.