I did not think I could make love this morning.

I’m recovering from pneumonia, and still taking several powerful medications, including steroids and antibiotics, still experiencing  a wracking cough, and when Maria and I woke up together this Sunday morning, I could feel that we might want to make love, this passes between us by some secret pathway, we just know.

Having had no sex in my life for many years, and carrying all the scars and inhibitions of the traumatized child, I do not ever take love for granted now. Being loved is my daily miracle. In all of my life, I had no idea in my life what it might be like.

But the truth was,  I did not think I would be able to make love to Maria this morning, between my coughing and headache and other post-pneumonia echoes.

In fact, I often want to make love and worry that I might one day not be able to – I keep reading this often happens to older men.  I sometimes dream that I will wake up one morning, and it will have happened to me. When you have lived nearly 60 years without love, and then find it, then the very idea of life and consciousness is altered.

Older people are not supposed to talk about their sex lives, they are not expected to have any sex lives.

All the more reason to talk about it. As it happened, we did make love, being open does not mean sharing all the details, but I was once again relieved and in awe of what love with another human really means.

Even a decade ago, I was beginning to parrot the old talk I was hearing – at our age, etc., etc. – I had give up on love and happiness, I did not expect to experience either again in my lifetime. It felt like the first death. It was the first death.

But the spirit can be resurrected, even if the body cannot.

There are not many good words for it, even for a writer, but I see love – and its first cousin, happiness –  as a matter of trust, safety, openness and the fusing of one soul to another. It’s a leap of faith. A great risk, a great reward.

After I make love, I feel different, grounded, connected to the world in a particular way. I feel alive, and known and for at least a few moments, safe and open.

For most of my life, I would never permit myself to be naked in front of any other person, including my wife. I thought others might find it disgusting or  repellent, something common among former bed-wetters and traumatized children. And you will never see my wearing shorts.

Sometimes, I walk naked around the house for a few minutes in the morning, and I absolutely revel in seeing that Maria loves me for just the way I look and am, for what is inside of me, not outside of me.  She is always delighted when she sees me walking around naked, as if there are some mystical Google glasses than transform me into some handsome young man.

Her delight tells me a I am loved, and I will never take that for granted again.

Making love makes me happy, and making love with someone I love makes us happy together. I feel connected in a powerful and particular way.  No games, no uncertainty, no pretense. The giving of one’s self to another.

One day I may not be able to make love in familiar ways, but you know what? I will always find a way. Love is bigger than the body or any single part of it.

For people, love, when it is real,  is a spiritual thing, not an animal thing. I don’t make love for release, but for just the opposite – the most joyous kind of connection.

I know many older people who are sensual, wise and experienced in human connection. For us, unless we perhaps are the President, or those other awful men, love is not about impulse or release or instinct. It is not about dominance or pride, it is humbling, not arrogant, the complete submission of the self, the release of ego and fear.

After we make love, Maria and I simply hold one another, and  most often fall into a deep sleep, a rest so deep and rich it only comes after love’s release from water and lament.

it is an affirmation of the heart and soul, the mystical pathway that connects us to other people and binds us in affirming and nourishing way. Happiness for me is about spectral moments, flashes of the glory of the world.

This morning, I was reading the always compelling and stimulating weekly blog Brain Pickings by Maria Popova – I recommend it very highly for those who like to think about things other than the news  –  and one of her topics this week is happiness.

Popova quotes a number of writers and poets about the meaning of happiness – Whitman, Emily Browning, Camus – and I spent some beautiful minutes thinking about what happiness is.

“What is happiness, anyhow?,” asked Whitman. “Is this one of its hours, or the like of it? – so impalpable – a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure – so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote of love “that it is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the window panes, is it not?”

The philosopher Albert Camus wrote that “there is no love of life without despair of life.” I believe this is true and important. Just as light follows darkness and Spring follows winter, pure love is revealed after loneliness, sadness, disappointment and despair. Love is nature’s antidote to life, I believe.

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness,” wrote Mary Oliver in one of her poems, “it took my years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

She also asked, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In my mind, I answered her back. I want to love and be loved, I said. I was breathing a little, I realized, and calling it a life.

Camus also write that being happy was a moral obligation. Happiness, he said, was like committing a crime. “You should never admit to it.

Gandhi wrote that “happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

The Dalai Lama also speaks often about happiness, he said the purpose of life is to be happy. The people who lead us and bring us their “news,” are not ever happy, and they offer us nothing but darkness and despair.

I have come to embrace the idea of happiness as a moral obligation. I find that happiness is contagious, if I am happy the people around me are happy. If I am happy, I can make other people happy. If I am happy, I am generous, drawn to do good.

We all have a fundamental right to be happy, and for me, happiness comes in moments, in flashes, in feelings, in connections.

I would hate to be happy all of the time. I would hate – I did hate – being happy none of the time. It is immoral to live a life of misery without love or meaning.

I won’t ever take love or happiness for granted again.