In 1961 Patsy Cline belted out the famous words of her top hit, “I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying…and crazy for loving you.” “Crazy” has since become a timeless classic telling the story of unrequited love to ensuing generations. Each lyric bears the pain of spurned affections and reminds listeners of insecurities in their own romantic relationships. When a lover chooses to walk away, it can be devastating.
Losing the person you love to death can be even more devastating. Two decades later another entertainment giant starred in the blockbuster tearjerker of 1983. “Terms of Endearment” also dealt with being crazy for someone, but this time it wasn’t physical love. The story begins with an anxious mother hovering over her newborn’s crib and finally shaking her awake because she can’t hear her breathing. Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) whose fear of losing her daughter Emma Horton (Debra Winger) results in a lifetime of smothering her with overprotection and unrelenting attention. Ultimately Aurora endures her worst fear…watching her grown daughter die from cancer. It is evident that her daughter’s suffering is as painful for Aurora as it is for Emma.
Loving another means living with the angst of possible loss. Ultimately each of us must deal with the unbearable pain of losing someone we love. Yet we go on to love again and again. Like moths and a flame we are drawn to something we know can, and often does, burn us. Why do we do this? Being crazy for someone means putting another’s needs first and making that person the center of our world. And…being crazy for someone means being transformed, bumping out spiritual dimensions within us, by allowing another to become the meaning of our existence.
What sparks this kind of love? It’s passion…an all-consuming emotion…that dwells in extremes…and sometimes looks irrational. Passion runs hot or cold…it has no lukewarm setting. When it comes to passion, not all lovers are created equal. Those with it have the capacity for being “crazy for loving” others.
This one scene captures the feeling so accurately of how it feels when you are losing somebody you love to an illness. First time I saw it, it brought tears to my eyes. And then years later, after I lost my mother, I watched it once then I decided it was too painful to ever watch again.
Later, I realized that in this world there are really only two types of people. People who have never lost anybody they loved and the people who have. And the people who haven’t lost anybody can make stupid jokes about dead mothers, babies, lovers, and never think about the pain of it. They can write TV shows about serial killers or people dying and it all sounds phony or hollow. Losing a person you love is something that can’t be imagined. People can say, “Oh, I understand what you must be going through” but they can’t. They will always be on the outside of that experience.
When my own mother was dying of cancer, I was told she had only a short time left. (She was so drugged up, she didn’t seem much different than at any other time in her illness.) It was like a countdown because the doctor and the nurses seemed to know exactly how much longer she had.
That was an unreal feeling.
But the strangest part (which wasn’t so strange when I thought about it later) was how calm and lackadaisical all of the hospital staff were taking the fact that MY MOTHER was dying. Didn’t they understand this was MY MOTHER? She wasn’t a NOBODY. She was somebody special to me..
But of course, they didn’t understand that. It was just another eight hour shift and a bed soon to be empty. It was just another patient and we were just another family losing a “somebody” they loved.