Love...Unconditionally

Love often comes with strings.
I love you if…
I love you when…
I love you because…

Love like this hurts.
I have been loved like this. A lot.

This is not love.
Love is unconditional.
Love loves you like my grandmother, Nana, loved me.

She loved me whether my grades were good or bad. She loved me whether I went to church or not.
She loved me even when I tried to make her stop. Even when I stole money from her purse, she loved me. Even when I wouldn’t eat the food she cooked for me, she loved me.
When I dropped out of college for a term in the spring of my sophomore year, my entire family stopped talking to me, everyone except Nana. She kept on supporting me. She kept on checking in to make sure that I was okay. She kept on loving me.

She learned about love with my grandfather. She loved him from the moment they met until the day he died, and thirty-four years beyond that, until the day that she died.

A few years after Nana died, my father gave me her wedding ring. He had been keeping it in his sock drawer. He gave it to me out of the blue, without ceremony.
“Here, do you think you might want this?” he said, casually dropping it into my hand. “It belonged to Nana,” he added, as though it needed identification. As though I wouldn’t be able to recognize the ring I had admired all my life.
When Patrick asked me to marry him, he asked what kind of ring I wanted. I tried to describe Nana’s rings to him. Patrick tried to match what I described, and he got it close, but not quite.

The little band of gold that my father so lightly tossed into my hand means more to me than anything else I own.
It is a narrow gold band, etched on the outside with a swirly design that the years have aged to a secret whisper between lovers. When I wear the ring, I can feel my grandparent’s love, their love for each other and their love for me.
I feel their courage. Their willingness to love in spite of rules that said they shouldn’t.
When they met, Nana was a sweet young thing, the thirteenth of fourteen children, and the only girl in a proper Chinese family. She had been encouraged to go to college and afterwards, she began a successful career as a traveling dental hygienist. Still, her brothers had plans for to marry a nice Chinese doctor.
Grandpa was Hawaiian, a widower and ten years her senior. His family wanted him to marry another Hawaiian woman, so as not to dilute the bloodlines.
They were not supposed to meet. They were not supposed to fall in love. And yet they did. When they got married, Nana’s older brothers, all twelve of them, disowned her. Grandpa’s family never accepted her. But they had each other, and then they had Daddy.

I wear their ring to remind me where I am going and from whence I came. On “fat” days, it goes on my left hand. On “thin” days I wear it on my right.
It gives me courage. It gives me strength. It gives me love.
Unconditionally.