What I Have Learned About When Love Prolongs Pain

We do not hold on too long because we are cruel.

Most of the time, we hold on because we care.

We call it love. We call it faithfulness. We call it loyalty. We tell ourselves that good people do not walk away, do not let go, and do not stop trying.

And without ever meaning to, we become the ones who prolong the pain.

"Your mother is trying to die"

During my years as a pastor, I sat in a great many hospital rooms. I watched people suffer. I watched people live their final hours in discomfort and torment.

One family has stayed in my mind for years. They had an elderly mother whom they loved deeply. Over a stretch of time, they brought her back and forth to the hospital at least five to seven times.

I was in the room when the doctor finally spoke to them plainly.

He did not say, "Her body is failing." He made it personal.

"Your mother is trying to die," he said. "You bring her in, and we fill her with fluids to sustain her and correct her blood levels. She rallies and feels a little better. Then she goes home, and because she is trying to die, she goes right back to the same place. You are only prolonging the inevitable."

Why did that family keep bringing her back?

It was not selfishness. It was not malice. They loved their mother, and they did not want to let her go.

But in the name of love, they were keeping her trapped inside the hardest part of her dying. Unwillingly and unknowingly, the people who loved her most had become the ones extending her suffering.

Wanting to go home

I saw another side of this with my own mother near the end of her life.

If you have ever spent time around elderly people whose minds have begun to slip, whether from Alzheimer's or simply the fog of advanced age, you may have heard them say the same thing over and over: they want to go home.

Sometimes they say it while sitting in the living room of the house they have lived in for decades.

With my mother, I came to believe that when she asked to go home, she was not talking about the house she owned as an adult. She was talking about her childhood home. Her mind had traveled back to an earlier reality. In that reality, she saw me only as a child, and she was looking for the place where she had once felt safe and whole.

There comes a point when a person has already begun to leave the room we are standing in. We can argue with them. We can insist they are already home. We can try to pull them back into our present.

Or we can love them enough to recognize that their season here is closing.

What we know about mercy, and where we forget it

When the counselor I mentioned in the last lesson talked about using a sharp knife, it made immediate sense to me because of how I was raised.

I grew up around animals. I was a hunter. I raised beef cattle. I was around poultry, pigs, deer, and turkeys, animals raised and slaughtered for specific purposes. Anyone who has lived around animals understands a basic moral truth: when a life is coming to an end, you bring it to a quick end.

You do not drag it out. You do not use a dull blade. You do not let a creature suffer when the outcome is already decided.

We understand that clearly when we look at the physical world. We understand the difference between mercy and torture. Even in the darkest corners of human law, such as an execution, human beings have historically gone to great lengths to make the end swift rather than drawn out.

Yet when we turn back to our own lives, we forget everything we know about mercy.

We drag out relationships that have been dead for years. We stay in jobs and careers long after the life has gone out of them. We keep dying routines, partnerships, and obligations on life support, pumping them full of just enough effort to rally them for a week or a month, only to watch them collapse right back into the same misery.

And we call that devotion.

Don't fight the net

Years ago, I preached a message I called "Don't Fight the Net."

It came from watching wildlife documentaries about animals that had wandered into places where they could no longer survive: a dolphin trapped in shallow water, a wolf caught in a snare, an alligator in a place where it was going to hurt itself or someone else.

To save the animal, rescuers had to capture it. And almost every time, the greatest danger to the animal was not the rescue. It was the struggle against the net. The animal fought what was trying to free it because it could not see beyond the capture.

Lifeguards learn a similar lesson about human beings. A panicking swimmer will instinctively grab hold of the person trying to save them and pull both of them under (Lifeguard University). What feels like survival to the person in panic is actually what drowns them both.

When something in our lives is over, our instinct is to fight the ending. We thrash against it. We grab hold of everyone around us to keep from going under.

Sometimes the most merciful thing we can do, for ourselves and for the people we love, is to stop fighting the net.

What I have learned

Caring about people is a good thing. Loyalty is a good thing.

But care without honesty can do the work of cruelty.

When a season, a role, a marriage, or a life has reached its true end, refusing to let go does not preserve what we love. It only stretches out the hurt for everyone in the room.

Real love has the courage to ask a hard question: Am I holding on for their sake, or because I cannot bear the pain of saying goodbye?

Sometimes the truest act of love is to stop pumping fluids into what is trying to die, open your hands, and let peace come.

The DKP Word 2026
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