Radiating the Love We Are
Feb 13, 2026
There is a moment — often unplanned, often uninvited — when the scaffolding of our life falls away and something essential is revealed.
Sometimes that moment arrives through illness. Sometimes through loss. Sometimes through exile, shame, or the quiet cost of standing alone. And sometimes, unmistakably, it arrives through death.
Not death as an abstraction, the way we tend to mentalize it in our culture, as a concept to be philosophized.
But death as presence — intimate, undeniable, and clarifying.
What I was reminded of so powerfully in my recent conversation with Pamela Jane Gerrand is this: death does not diminish love. It removes the conditions we place upon it.
Death is a great undoing.
So much of our life is spent modulating love. We ration it. We filter it. We offer it when it feels safe, appropriate, reciprocated, or sanctioned.
We learn, very early, that love has consequences.
That it can be withheld, rejected. That it can cost us belonging. And so we learn to dim the light of our love.
But death — when it is met consciously — does something extraordinary.
It strips away the performance. It dissolves the bargaining. It collapses the future-oriented self that is always preparing, guarding, rehearsing.
In its presence, love no longer asks: Is this too much? Will I be punished for this? Will it cost me later? Is this allowed?
Love simply radiates.
Imminent death is a kind of permission slip. When someone we love is dying — truly dying — something ancient awakens in us.
We stop managing. We stop posturing. We stop editing. The heart steps forward without asking the mind for approval.
In those moments, love becomes unapologetic, unstrategic, and unconditional. It pours.
And what becomes unmistakably clear is that the love we are capable of radiating at the threshold of death was always available to us.
Death doesn’t create that love. It liberates it.
One of the deepest lies we carry — individually and collectively — is that love must be earned, calibrated, or made safe. That it must be justified, measured, or defended.
But when death enters the room, all of that collapses. There is no time left for withholding. No utility in armor. No reward for restraint.
And so we see — often too late — that love was never the problem.
Fear was.
What struck me most in Pamela’s story was not grief as suffering — but grief as revelation. Her mother, facing the end of her physical life, did not shrink. She expanded. She radiated love with a clarity and intensity that left no doubt that love survives the body, that relationship does not end, and that presence is not confined to form.
In that radiance, something was transmitted — not as words, but as knowing: there is no death. There is only a change in how love reaches us.
And this is the quiet question death asks the living:
What would you become if you stopped waiting for permission to love fully?
Why does this matter so much now? Because we are living in a time that has tested love relentlessly.
Many have lost family, community, and belonging — not because they lacked compassion, but because they chose to listen inwardly rather than comply outwardly. Others have been brought to stillness through illness, exhaustion, or grief. Still others feel the quiet ache of knowing they are living at half-volume.
And beneath all of it is the same invitation:
Stop dimming what is true.
Stop waiting for safety that never comes.
Radiate anyway.
Love is not sentimental. The love I’m speaking of is not soft in the way the world defines softness. It is not performative. It is not appeasing. It is not compliant.
It is sovereign. It stands without justification, remains without consensus, and radiates without permission.
This is the love that survives persecution, illness, and ultimately, death. And perhaps most confronting of all — this is the love that survives being seen.
Here's a quiet invitation for you.
If this past season of your life has stripped something away from you; if it has revealed places where you have been holding back... if it has cracked your heart open in ways you didn’t ask for... sit gently with this question:
What love is asking to radiate through me now — not later, not when it’s safer, not when I’m healed — but now?
You don’t need to answer it with words. Your body already knows.
And if death teaches us anything, it is this:
What we are, in truth, is love. Everything else is rehearsal.
To listen to the podcast episode associated with this post, click here.
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