More than moon… and That Was Love - The Love of My Life

In T.C. Boyle’s, “The Love of My Life”, China and Jeremy’s love consists of a matter-of-fact statement written in speech form.

When the narrator says, “Five days. And it wasn’t going to rain, not a drop. He didn’t even bring his fishing rod, and that was love.”

This phrase defines love as something that exists when individuals are united. The idea was, when these people are together, nothing else matters. However, after their unprotected sexual encounter, Jeremy and China had to part ways.

The Moment: The moment when Jeremy and China must part ways to go to different schools and she reads him, “A Valediction of Weeping.”

“More than moon, that was it, lovers parting and their tears swelling like the ocean til the girl—the woman—the female—had more power to raise the tides than the moon itself, or some such. More than moon. That’s what he called her after that, because she was white and round and getting rounder, and it was no joke, and it was no term of endearment.

She was pregnant.”

In the poem they talk about a girl who is impregnated with tears from her lover, which John Donne describes as, “Fruit of much grief,” due to their farewell. In this short story, T.C. Boyle uses this poem as a way to show how separation can change the love between two people. Being pregnant draws them apart even more than their physical separation. At the end of the story, all she can remember is the time when they were camping together, and all he can remember is the way she looked when she was giving birth. Perhaps Jeremy killed their child to save their love. He rationalized that he was doing the world a favor, but by the end of the ordeal and incarceration he could hardly remember what “his love” (China) looked like.

Question: If this story is a commentary on the effects separation can have on love, do you believe that love can exist in the absence of physical and/or emotional togetherness?