Love hurts. The deeper the love, the sharper the pain. For love is haunted by absence. All loves are lost to time, distance, darkness. Easier, in a way, not to care.

I write this after a visit with my daughter’s three children, a weekend sleepover, no ceremonial occasion, just a chance to say hi. Ages 11, 8, and 5, how with each visit they grow! They come to know Henry as he comes to know them, leaping somersaults in his joy at their arrival, gazing after them perplexedly as they drive away, straining his leash.

I follow them in my thoughts. I want to hear about their days, their discoveries and events. I want to study the wreathing of their lives.

I can’t get enough of them – or of the other lives I love. And then it comes to me, after a sleep, how soon I must leave them or they me. And that prospect plunges me into a sadness that throbs.

My children taught me love. I was raised not to. Affection was never expressed in my childhood home; passion was weakness. I do not believe my parents were hard-hearted, only well-behaved, according to the prescripts of their tribe. It was weak and perilous to feel, one followed a path; feeling could knock you off course. Many promising careers had been crippled by sentiment. Beware.

I do not think we were so unusual. Love is disruptive, anarchic, tyrannical; a troublemaker, it wrecks plans. Reason loathes loves almost as much as it does individuals. Digits are easier than people to add and subtract.

So much easier not to love. My first quarter century I marched through like a scrubbed cadet. I wanted to love, of course, but that was from books and movies. I knew nothing about it, how to get it – or give it. (“Romantic love can very well be represented in the moment, but conjugal love cannot, because an ideal husband is not one who is such once in his life but one who is every day such,” wrote Kierkegaard.)

I was OK without love, I decided. But then I caught it bad – from my kids, my dog, Jane. I fled it – into solitude – it was easier there – only why bother? Love, once you catch it, is the only good reason to be – and won’t rest easy in its room alone.

Retirement gave me more time to love, which deepened love and its hurt. Love is not a problem to think through, but a tide that sucks you deeper and deeper. The more you love, the more you need to, the less reasonable you become or tolerant of interference. I understood better why my parents had never shown love or urged it. The trouble it makes!

Love watches the clock. Every minute that ticks past brings us a minute closer to parting – while my supply of minutes dwindles!

A newcomer to love (and slow learner), I only began to get the hang of it as my hair turned gray. As with many later-in-life converts, my exuberance extolled my discovery till hearers begged mercy: “Enough about love already, this news is not new.”

Love saved me, I’m sure of that, but from what? From its absence. Love lights the world like the bulb inside my boyhood’s National Geographic desk globe (the metaphor dogs me), so the world glows. It’s the same earth with the bulb turned on or off, the same oceans and continents and imposed divides, but somehow only lit does the world invite living in.

It feels good to hurt, the deeper the better.