Why you can go on loving someone even without proof they're still alive

Picture a woman sitting on a plastic chair in a hospital corridor at three in the morning, waiting for a doctor to come back with results she is dreading. There is nothing productive she can do in that stretch of time. She cannot influence the outcome, cannot speed up the lab, cannot even distract herself with anything that holds her attention for long. What gets her through the hour, she realises afterward, is not resolve or willpower. It is that she keeps bringing her father's voice into her head, he died three years earlier, and imagines, in detail, exactly what he would say to her right now, and she answers him back.

Viktor Frankl describes something close to this from his own years in the camps, where he had no way of knowing whether his wife was even alive. Mail did not reach prisoners in either direction. And yet, marching to a work site before dawn, freezing and starving, he found himself in what he calls a mental conversation with her, asking her questions, hearing her answer, picturing her expression so vividly that, in his words, it was more luminous than the sun beginning to rise. He is explicit that this was not wishful thinking about a rescue. It was something else: the discovery that love, as he came to understand it, is not really aimed at a person's physical presence at all, but at their inner being, and that inner being can be reached whether the person is near, far, or even dead.

This is the argument behind what Frankl calls one of the ways a life finds meaning: through encountering another person in their own particular uniqueness, which is what he means by love. He goes further than most people would be comfortable with. He says that had he known for certain that his wife was dead, he believes his inward conversation with her would have continued just as vividly and would have been just as sustaining. The relationship, in other words, does not depend on being confirmed from outside. It depends on how completely you have taken the other person into yourself. That is not a claim that presence and touch don't matter, only that when they are taken away, something of the relationship can still remain, intact, doing real work.

When you are facing something you cannot control, a wait, a fear, a long stretch of loneliness, try deliberately calling up the presence of someone you love, whether they are near, far away, or gone. Picture them clearly enough to hear how they would actually respond to you, not a vague comforting blur. Speak to them in your mind, and let them answer back in their own voice, their own phrasing. Notice that this doesn't require you to know how things will turn out, or even whether they themselves are safe, the relationship you carry can hold its value regardless of the outcome. Treat that inward connection as something real enough to lean on, not a consolation prize for the real thing.