"I gave myself permission to love Liam even if I never saw him again, even if we never spoke again, even if I fell in love with someone else."

Larissa Kaye Batten (llbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.  

"Loving isn’t leaving," Liam told me emphatically.

"It’s something I have to do," I told him yet again. "I have to do it for me."

He did not understand this, and I could not blame him for resisting my decision.

Although I knew I had made the right decision, I had also made one of the most difficult decisions of my life.

"I love you, but I don’t love your disease," I had told him.

I could not take credit for these words, as I had borrowed them from several support resources.

I loved this man dearly, and yet his alcoholism had taken a nasty and permanent toll on us.

He was not willing to get help at the time, and I knew by then that I did not have the wherewithal to fix either him or our relationship.

Yet some months after the end of our tumultuous, passionate relationship, he was not convinced of my decision.

I knew I still loved him, and I was aching to get back together with him. But I knew it was too late. I had grown enough in those months to realize that our relationship was not meant to resume. I knew that I would not survive it if it did. The stakes had been too high at the end, and I knew in my gut they would only become higher.

The day we met in the park by accident, he explained to me his theory about loving and leaving. It was a borrowed theory, I was to discover, and one he believed in vehemently.

"Loving isn’t leaving," he said.

"If you really loved me," he must have said next, "Then – "

I could not be caught again in the web of my own denial, compounded by his own denial.  I had denied the full extent of his alcoholism. I had denied my inability to change him, and I had denied my own role in the downfall of our relationship.

We walked through the park that day together, not unlike so many of the walks we had taken in the past. Only this time we did not hold hands.

Liam took me back to my apartment, and we stood on the terrace together. I felt sick in my soul. Sick to know we were no longer together. Sick to know I no longer felt the passion for him. Sick to know that although I still loved him, I was not romantically in love with him. I was healing, and yet the healing was terrifying to me. I had known such love for him; I had not known there would be anything other than us. And here I was, standing right beside the man I had loved for so long, and I could not muster up the same old feelings. I was finished. Our love was finished. And it made me sick to realize this.

We walked more that day, and we said a painful goodbye.

While I had begun to heal, I soon found myself stopped in my tracks.  Although I did not want to physically be with Liam anymore, I could not deny how much I still loved him.

I could not see from my vantage point how I could move on if I could not stop loving him.

Loving wasn’t leaving, was it?

My answer arrived through the grace of a fellow human being. I do not remember her name, her face, or whether I ever saw her again.

She was a fellow recovering human being, and, like myself, she struggled desperately with the concept of letting go.

Her words were simple, and I will never forget them.

"I learned that letting go of someone doesn’t mean I have to stop loving them," she said the day I met her.

We only crossed paths for an hour or so, but her message has stayed with me ever since.

Until the moment I heard her message, I had believed that loving someone meant I was supposed to stay with that person at any cost.

"Letting go of someone doesn’t mean I have to stop loving them," she had said.

In all honesty, I had never heard a message so rich, so simple, so clear, and so true to my own soul.

I saw in those moments, in the minutes afterward, and in the days and months and years to come, what I had never known before.

Previously, and naively perhaps, I had believed that to love someone means to be with that person no matter what.

But the message I received from that woman that day woke something up inside me – a truth I had never realized.

As soon as I heard the words, I knew them to be true.

It was as though I had always known, yet never been able to put my finger, my heart, my soul on it.

Leaving someone didn’t mean I had to stop loving them.

From that day forward, something very strange, very beautiful happened.

I gave myself permission to always love Liam.

I gave myself permission to love Liam even if I never saw him again, even if we never spoke again, even if I fell in love with someone else, even if I one day came to love myself the way I so much needed to.

I gave myself permission to love Liam no matter what.

I am not sure Liam understood how I could still love him yet not want to be with him. But I believe that one day, if he has not already, he will receive the same gift I did.

Being able to leave because it is the right thing to do, being able to love because love is the right thing to feel, being able to forgive because forgiveness is a gift, and being able to move on with the grace of a free love, or a "higher love" as Liam once called it, is a miracle beyond miracles.

Love is a miracle.

Leaving and still loving is a miracle.

Loving Liam is a miracle for me.

I will always love Liam in my soul, and I am not ashamed of that.

In fact, I am proud of my love for him.

What it shows me is that love does conquer all. It shows me that soul love is insurmountable.

Love from the soul is pure love. It is the love of one’s fellows, the love of humankind, the love of oneself, the love of one.

Liam is no longer my lover; Liam is not even my friend.

But Liam is my fellow, and I strive to love all my fellows.

My husband knows I love Liam. My husband knows I love Liam in a spiritual way, the same way I aspire to love all people.

My old boyfriend Kevin once said he would always save a corner of his heart for me. He said he did that with all his old girlfriends.

May I always have room in my heart for my fellows.

May I remember that the love of the universe is not conditional; the love of God is forever.

And just as God’s love is forever, so may my own love for my fellows live on.

Amen.

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