Sharon Olds: The Harder Job

The Harder Job
(for Tina and Paul Kane)

Love gives to some the harder job,

to some the easier. And it doesn’t

seem to be those who love the most deeply

who always get the harder job,

or the easier. It isn’t love

which gives us our work, but raw, cold

chance, which may strike the beloved in an instant,

or slowly grind the dearest one

down and down to death—for some,

sure as an execution in the morning, all the

pardons gone, for some it may be

years from now. Meanwhile, extreme

suffering, as in war, without war’s

malice. When you have joined, for life

and beyond it, with the one whose presence

touches you profoundly with your luck, it is not so much

hard to love even more through the worst—

an illness which dismembers, which silences—

as impossible not to. If there were music

for this, it could be a late ferocious

quartet, or an opera—its almost screaming

anguish. It is not a devised torture

to have to watch the dearest one

there was, or is, or will be, lose

everything, attribute by

lovely skill, speech and motion and

eventually breath. And look at him

as he looks at her, it is as if

love is a particulate light,

which his gazes, which the silver fibers of his lashes,

move toward her. And when you look

head-on at him, when his hands are on

the pinion-stubs of her wheelchair handles,

it is like looking at an archway through which

is visible a pure shining,

a power stronger than anything—

­unable to heal her, unable to keep her

here, the fierce workings of love—which is

the means by which we exist, and the reason we exist.

Sharon Olds