Friday, February 14, 2020 // The Statement
2B

Managing Statement Editor

Magdalena Mihaylova

Deputy Editors

Emily Stillman

Marisa Wright

Associate Editor

Reece Meyhoefer

 Designers

 Liz Bigham

 Kate Glad

 Copy Editors

 Madison Gagne 

 Sadia Jiban

 

Photo Editor 

Keemya Esmael

Editor in Chief

Elizabeth Lawrence

Managing Editor

Erin White

I

n Hebrew, the word for “to love” 
has the same root as the word “to 
give.” I’ve always admired the way 
an ancient language is woven together with 
purpose, the way the words hang on to each 
other, collide, twist into webs of meaning 
that say more together than any word could 
alone. 
To love and to give. This is what it looks 
like:
After six decades, my grandparents argue 
over what year they got married. One after-
noon at lunch, they interrupt each other as 
they tell me and my sister about that cold 
February, a month of love, a night in the 
stained-glass chapel. My grandpa emphati-
cally swings his corned beef sandwich in the 
air and insists it was the winter of ’58, a year 
of recession. They tell us about their first 
place together, a small townhouse on West-
brook in Detroit, near Six Mile. When my 
grandfather was in the Navy, my grandma 
wrote him letters every day. We talk about 
school and how my mother works too much. 
When we walk them to the car, my grandpa 
opens the passenger door and ushers his 
wife inside. 
In home movies, you never see my dad — 
he’s always behind the camera. On the day 
my twin sister and I were born, he points 
the lens at the two babies in my mother’s 
arms and says “Hi, girls” just like he did this 
morning on the phone. As we sort through 
old photo albums, I find a picture of him 
playing a baby grand piano — the gift my 
mom bought him when they got married. 
There are two babies in walkers on the floor 
— me and my sister — and our dog is perched 
at the window. I imagine my mom behind 
the camera, capturing in that instant what 
must have been everything: the sunlight, 
the music, the husband, the kids and the dog 
in the house they built to raise their family. I 
think of them now in the living room, sitting 
in quiet contentment at the end of another 
long day at work, wordless over the hum of 
the evening news of tragedy somewhere 
and cautious peace somewhere else. They 
are warm and together and lucky under the 
same roof.
How lucky am I to know what love looks 
like: the dreamy kind, the waterlogged and 
dusty wedding album, the woman in a deli-

cate white lace dress and the man in a black 
bowtie, wide-eyed, gazing at the camera. I 
know the hard kind, too: The day my grand-
ma swears she can’t live without my grandpa, 
tough doctor’s appointments and decisions to 
sell the house. The giving of everything — for 
better, for worse, till death do us part, he will 
make sure she gets home safely. Hundreds of 
letters sent back and forth, hundreds of phone 
calls. Maybe they sacrificed a lot, maybe she 
can’t stand the way he leaves toothpaste in 
the sink, and he hates how she bites her nails. 
Maybe it doesn’t always feel like love, when 
we let each other down, when we break a 
promise or forget to say thank you. Maybe 
we don’t love hard enough, or easy enough or 
right enough. 
But look at us, learning how to do it any-
way. On midnight at the rundown diner, I 
sit across from my best friend. We share a 
plate of fries and talk about our weekends. 
When I say we talk about our weekends, I 
mean we talk about the way we felt when he 
walked us home and didn’t kiss us goodbye; 
the way it’s been years since he called us a 
bitch but we still miss him; the way we felt 
euphoric and horrified at the idea of anyone 
seeing our naked bodies, our faces without 
make-up or reading what we might have to 
say about love. We lick the grease off our fin-
gers and say whatever we can: forget about 
him, or go for it, or I’m so sorry, or you are 
beautiful the way you are and that is not 
what love is, it can’t be. 
We talk about our parents and our sis-
ters and our family dinners where everyone 
fights and then makes up. We talk about the 
aging love of our grandparents and the fresh 
love of a newlywed sibling. We remind our-
selves we orbit around planets of this love, 
the unconditional kind, the kind we feel like 
we don’t deserve, the people who give us 
everything without asking for anything in 
return. 
What do we have to give? I want to give 
love as fiercely as I’ve received it. I won-
der what it takes to sustain half a century 
of marriage, what it means to see the man 
across the room and smile, to fall in love 
gently, if there is such a thing. Sometime 
when I was young, I learned you should love 
your neighbor as you love yourself, and at 
some point since then, I must have forgotten 

that means you have to love yourself first. 
That’s always been the hardest part, 
hasn’t it? Loving ourselves? My mom thinks 
I have bad taste in guys; I think I just can’t 
figure out how to look in the mirror and love 
the way my body curves, the way my lips 
form words, the way my hand curls around 
a pen to write, the way my mind shifts into 
bouts of worry, the way I’m silent in a crowd, 
the way I’m sometimes cruel, sometimes 
reckless, sometimes ungrateful for the love 
that is given to me. I hope that I’ll love better 
when I love myself. I hope that what I have 
to give will be enough. 
Right now, though, there is something so 
palpable about the love around me, some-
thing so promising and so heartbreaking. 

Across the table, my grandpa wraps his hand 
around my grandma’s fingers, and my sister 
kicks me under the table as if to say look at 
that, that’s love. We eat our sandwiches in 
comfortable silence, and I think of the shaky 
lens of a home movie, the camera zooming 
in on a younger version of my grandmother 
holding her newborn granddaughter, what 
a life it’s been, what words could never cap-
ture, what’s been given and taken and lost 
and loved. 

Emily Stillman is a senior in LSA studying 
Organizational Studies and is a Deputy State-
ment Editor. She can be reached at erstill@
umich.edu.

statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | FEBRUARY 14, 2020

BY EMILY STILLMAN, DEPUTY STATEMENT EDITOR
This is what it looks like

PHOTO COURTESY OF EMILY STILLMAN

