I am sure that you have heard the saying taken from a popular song, "The best things in life are free." I am also sure that most of us would agree that some of the best things in life are prohibitively expensive. Often they appear to be freely given but carry an invisible price tag. Love is one of those things.

Those of us who have lost loved ones have learned in our sorrow that we pay an enormous price for love when it ceases to flow. We pay in the coin of grief, loving, yearning and missing. It hurts so much, does it not? The bitter truth is that every love story has an unhappy ending, and the greater the love, the greater the unhappiness when it ends.

Whenever we love someone, we give a hostage to fortune. Whenever we permit someone to become very dear to us, we become vulnerable to disappointment and heartbreak. What then , is our choice? Never to permit ourselves to love? Never to permit anyone to matter to us? To deny ourselves the greatest of all God-given joys?

If loving is expensive, the being unloved and unloving costs even more. I believe that even in our grief we can still agree with the sentiments of a contemporary writer, "To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides."

Think about this. If some angel came to us in our deepest sorrow and offered to remove all our pain and all our longing, but with them there would also be removed all our memories of years and events shared, would we agree to this bargain? Or, would we consider those memories so precious, so infinitely dear, that we would hug them close to our hearts and refuse to purchase instant relief by surrebndering them?

An ancient Greek legend offers us a clue to the choice we would probably make. It tells of a woman who came down to the River Styx, where Charon, the gentle fairy man, stood ready to take her to the region of the departed spirits. Charon reminded her that it was her privilege to drink the water of Lethe, and that if she did so, she would completely forget all that she was leaving behind.

Eagrely she said, "I will forget how I suffered." To which Charon replied, "But remember, you will also forget how you rejoiced." The the woman said, "I will forget my failures." The fairy man replied, "And also your victories." Again the woman said, "I will forget how I have been hurt." Charon responded, "You will also forget how you have been loved."

The woman then paused to think the whole matter through, and the legend concludes by telling us that she did not drink the waters of Lethe, preferring to hold on to the memory even of her suffering and her sorrow rather than surrender the remembrances of life's joys and love. I recall a saying that my mother told me whenever I suffered some kind of pain, "Not to have pain is not to be human." The pain passes, the memories remain; loved ones leave us, but the gift of love remains. And we are so much richer and so much better for having paid the high cost of loving.

Jacob Friedman is the rabbi of the Jewish Community Center in Long Beach Island, New Jersey. He has authored numerous articles, lectured widely, written creative prayer pamphlets, and published sermon pamphlets.