I know what it’s like to have someone love you more than anything else in the world…know what it’s like to have that lift you, give you value, hide in it…
And then my mom left this world.
There is something about love that proves our immortality. The longing to be with another again…it must be fulfilled, we must see them again, touch them again. Their love must touch our love. It must cross the borders of space and time—or this life is not real.
It’s human to taste of immortality in love. We long to love someone forever. It’s not something we just say, but something we desire. We want to be near our loved ones when we die. Love desires eternity. That desire for eternity is beautifully illustrated by two skeletons that were unearthed in 2014—they had been holding hands for 700 years!4 Love cannot be taken away when we die.
Our love requires immortality to fulfill its longing to love forever. “Furthermore, since the soul is immortal, happiness cannot be satisfied by something that ends in death,” penned Boethius—from his prison cell. If love’s desire is to be united for eternity, and if every desire is proof of a corresponding real subject that can fulfill that desire, then immortality must exist in order to complete love.
Love is the one thing that in us that is infinite. It’s the one thing that we can look at and see that we will live beyond this life. If there is no immortality, there is no love. To love is the only thing which can occupy, fill, and surpass eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible. Love partakes of the eternity itself. It is of the same nature.5
“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”