People say that time heals all wounds. I have heard this said a thousand times, with great conviction, by people who meant well. And with all the love in my heart, I want to say: I do not believe it. I have seen people carry the same wounds for twenty years, for forty years. Time did not heal them. Time only moved them farther from the original event. The wound itself, unaddressed, unloved, unwitnessed, remained exactly as it was.
What heals wounds is love. Not time. Love. The specific, named, embodied love of people who see you in your brokenness and choose to stay.
The Love That Found Me in the Church
When I was displaced and had nowhere to go, I went to the Church of the Virgin of Altagracia. I arrived with nothing, no plan, no money, no certainty about tomorrow. What I found there was a community of people in the same situation, and in that community, something I did not expect: love.
Mrs. Rosa, God rest her soul; she shared her food with me so I would not face the loneliness of an empty plate. Others on that church floor treated me like family, like someone who mattered, like someone whose presence was a gift rather than a burden. That love did not erase my poverty. But it made it survivable. And survival, I have learned, is the first form of healing.
“There was always someone who shared their food with me, so I would not have to face loneliness. In that sharing, I found the shape of God.”
My Grandmother’s Lap
When I think of the love that healed me most deeply, I think of my grandmother. I would lie in her lap and fall asleep as she told me stories. She would gently comb my little eyebrows, a small, tender, completely unnecessary gesture, and in that gesture, everything was right with the world. She was not solving any of my problems. She was not fixing anything. She was just present and warm and entirely mine.
That love, that uncomplicated, unqualified, grandmother-in-the-afternoon love, became a place I returned to for the rest of my life. On every terrible night, on every impossible morning, I would go back to that lap in my memory and find, waiting for me there, a kind of peace that nothing in the external world could provide. Love, when it is real, does not end when the person leaves. It becomes a place inside you.
The Love of Children
My children, Celeddy and Álvaro, are the most tangible proof that miracles are not merely stories. Each of them was brought into this world under conditions that should have been impossible. Each of them arrived healthy and whole. Each of them, from their very first breath, gave me something to live for that was stronger than anything the world could take.
There is a particular kind of love that flows from parent to child and another that flows from child to parent, that cannot be described in language. It can only be experienced. When my son took my hand, when my daughter looked at me with a trust so complete it broke my heart open, I understood what all the suffering had been for. It had been making room. Making room for love this large to live inside me.
How to Let Love Heal You
The first step is the hardest: you have to let yourself be loved. Not earn it. Do not perform your way into it. Don’t wait until you feel worthy. You are already worthy. You always were. The love that is available to you, from God, from community, from the memory of those who shaped you, does not have a prerequisite.
Open your hands. Accept the plate of food that a stranger offers. Accept the hug that costs nothing. Accept the prayer that someone says over you. Let the tears come when the kindness is more than you expected. Let yourself be seen in your neediness, in your imperfection, in your beautiful, struggling humanness. That is where healing starts. Not when you become strong enough to stop needing. But when you become brave enough to need out loud.
“Love is the only medicine I have ever found that works every single time. And it is always available. Always free. Always enough.”
— Luci Partela
