Free Whatever...Love Is Love by Maria Bello Page B

they still are.
    On January 12, 2010, I was sitting in a room with a couples’ counselor. Bryn and I had been seeing her for months, knowing that our romantic relationship was ending but not sure how to actually finish it. She had us draw diagrams of our “families of origin” to see why we were afraid of intimacy. She made us hold each other in a strange yoga pose and breathe together when we were in the midst of a fight. It was all pretty ineffectual, to be frank. I actually came to loathe this curly-red-haired lady with the pursed lips who dressed like a hippie. On this day, I knew it would be the last time I saw her.
    I sat with her in the office alone while Bryn sat outside in the waiting room on the day we had agreed to finally break up. Bryn is truly one of the greatest men I’ve ever met, and our shared values of love, truth, and service drew us together, but we weren’t meant to stay in our relationship as it currently existed. And though I was terrified how our breakup might affect my then eight-year-old son, who loved Bryn, I knew I was making the right choice. Our age difference and where we were in our lives made it impossible to continue our live-in romantic relationship. And he knew it, too. Right before my session ended, Bryn burst through the door. “There’s been an earthquake in Haiti!” he shouted. I immediately got up and ran to his side to watch the news report on his phone. This beautiful country I loved was in ruins, her people screaming and crying.
    There were 20-something of us on a plane headed to Port-au-Prince, six days after the earthquake. We were a motley crew of professional aid workers, Hollywood folks, a tugboat captain, a yoga instructor, doctors, a politician, and a woman who actually brought an entire suitcase with an espresso maker in it and another large one marked makeup . I can’t say everyone had the same reasons for going to the disaster zone. Some were excited by the adrenaline, following disaster after disaster. Some had seen the news and knew that they had to be of service.
    Looking out the window of the plane as it descended on the tarmac that day, I did not see the Haiti I knew. There was a film of yellow dust in the sky shutting out the usually bright sun. The bright blue waters of the Caribbean that I loved seeing upon my arrival were mixed with brown dirt. Everywhere buildings were half standing and destroyed. My mistress was dying.
    The first night, sleeping on the ground under eucalyptus trees outside of a crumbling old house behind walls, we heard the sounds of grief on the streets. But deep in the night, two of my fellow aid workers awoke to the sound of singing just as the sun was rising. They jumped in a truck to see where it was coming from, and followed the voices to a place just up the hill—a previously beautiful golf club that was now half destroyed, with thousands of families living there under sheets. One of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen was the U.S. Army handing bags of rice down the hill in a line of 50 or so service people at sunrise, like an old-fashioned fire brigade. Below were women in a line, peacefully waiting their turn to get their bag of rice. And they were singing, like angels. When we asked our translator what they were singing, he said it was a song of gratitude for who was still alive. They could have been singing songs of grief, but instead were thanking God for the gift of life. The soldiers were like angels delivering kindness and compassion to the weak and weary.
    Those of us who went in those days just after the quake all experienced a deep despair, and an incredible joy, feelings that would bond us together for life. In those first few months after the earthquake, I saw the best and worst of what human beings, nature, and I are capable of. I saw moments of grace that I won’t ever forget. We were all changed by what we experienced. When I left Haiti for the first time after the