Love and Family

The Most Difficult Choice

A stylized pen and ink portrait of Cassandra and I, given to her on Valentine’s Day.

Family is a term tossed around with little consideration. To some it’s only blood, which removes any significance from the word. It dilutes the meaning to something superficial, assigned to us at birth against our will, no more significant than surname or eye color.

No, family is a choice. Because family is love and love is a choice.

When you choose to love someone, whether it’s a child, partner, or pet, and they choose to love you, there’s an agreement that often goes unspoken or is simply glossed over if spoken in vows. 

We choose to love until death do us part.

Losing a loved one, someone you have chosen to truly love and been chosen to be loved by, who you’ve chosen as your family, is unbearable. It breaks many people, shattering minds and upending lives. The term a broken heart comes from the physical response of loss, in which the acute influx of stress weakens the muscle. 

We know the risk yet we choose to love anyway.

We choose love because the time spent with that person is so valuable, so wonderful, that the inevitable pain from losing them is acceptable. Each day we choose that person who makes our heart smile, despite knowing that one day they’ll break our heart when they leave this world.

They’ll die, tomorrow or twenty years from now, no one can be sure. They’ll die, and leave us only with a dark, insatiable void. A space once occupied and lit by their radiance.

And yet, we still choose to love them.

That’s love. There is not a greater choice we make in this life, and a choice it is.

Family is a collection of people who choose to love each other. There is no other kind of family, none that is anymore meaningful than a dice roll. Family is thicker than blood. Family, that we choose.

You can enjoy someone, even admire them and befriend them without choosing to love them.  Because love is a choice that carries great responsibility due to the inevitable consequences. It shouldn’t be squandered.

And we must make that choice every day, always choosing to love, always understanding and accepting the risk. Love is an action, not a passive condition.

My family know who they are because they know who I am. If love is a two way street so must family be. They know because they chose to love me, chose me as family, as I know them because they’ve been chosen by me.

I will choose love wherever it chooses me. 

I’ll choose my family.

-Victor

---