Last month as I prepared to sing in public, as amateurs occasionally do, I decided to dust off an old song I once sang. Sunshine Superman. I had it in pretty good shape at one point. Then, as I was working on my inflections, I heard the words for the first time in fifty years. And there was a line that really bothered me. “You’re gonna be mine and I know it.” Suddenly, I thought of a guy buying a house or a car and I knew I was never going to sing it public.

I mean, seriously, gonna be mine? Maybe that works in the teenage mind, but I can guarantee you that when it comes to love possession has nothing to do with it. If you get it, love, you never own it. It’s shared with you, and you better be careful with it, because it can slip away in a heartbeat, which is why relationships take work. It’s a mutual thing. One of those great gifts you don’t get all that often, and you better cherish it when it comes along, when someone says, yeah, I want to spend my life with you, or I want to be your friend.

Of course, Donovan may have been coming at the subject from the conquest perspective, in which case gonna be mine actually works. And if that’s the case, it’s sort of sad and self-centered. And I’m still never going to sing it because it doesn’t feel tender, and that’s the part I like about love, tenderness, caring for the other and them caring about you. I like the mutuality of love, it’s fluid nature that flows back and forth, its other worldliness. It’s why I like this line from a poem, Epitath, by Merrit Malloy, that was read at my friend’s celebration of life yesterday:

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale