I am on an airplane somewhere between Denver and San Francisco, thousands of miles above thousands-mile high, snow-covered peaks that lean into the wind like the sails of boats on the sea.

A newlywed couple sits beside me, married less than a year I know, because her arms are loaded nearly to the elbows with sparkly, jeweled, red and white glass choodas (bangles), a tradition of Indian women, particularly those from Punjab, who wear them three to six months after they are married, a symbol that she is still to be pampered (i.e., no kitchen duties yet!) while they settle into their lives together. They are both model-beautiful, in their 20s and crazy, deliriously, obsessively in love, the way only newlyweds seem to be, dangling on thick chords of blissful subjugation to each other, like a counter-balance constantly pulling each other up into and back down to one another in a delicate ballet.

They sit huddled over the same magazine, a Cosmopolitan, with articles entitled, “How Crazy-In-Love Couples Behave,” and “The Sexiest Spots to Touch Him Down There,” and “True Tales of Over-the-Top Romance,” which they pour over like a rare manuscript, coming back to the same articles again and again, pointing to sentences and nodding excitedly, saying things like, “That’s us,” or “I remember when you…” and the occasional, “Aww, isn’t that sweeet?” They are not two sitting beside me but a unit, a Couple, and they are drowning ecstatically in their adoration of one another, as if they have met the mighty Ganges at last and, finally, waded in to be swallowed whole in her swell… cleansed, purified, delivered.

I am coming from Oklahoma where yesterday we buried my 32-year-old cousin, Melissa, or Missy, as we have called her since childhood. Her six-year-old stepdaughter, who had decided to lay with her on the couch when Missy declared she couldn’t sleep, awoke her father early the next morning with shouts of, “Daddy, she’s purple! She’s purple!” to which Missy’s husband of only two years, Buck, whom she had lovingly nursed through gut-wrenching, life-threatening cancer and unending nights of sickness, days through which they had emerged victorious, triumphant over death, finding each other finally after too many failed starts and failed relationships, her husband, who now frantically tried to revive her cold body while Missy’s own 12-year-old daughter looked on, shrieking and shaking with disbelief.

At the funeral, Buck walks past relatives and friends and strangers as if he is walking beside himself, an observer to this event to which he did not want to be invited. He has the eyes of a refugee, glazed, only half seeing us, not able to fully comprehend the words coming to him in broken syllables, like a crackling radio signal coming from a country very far away, in a language he does not understand.

This is grief, and this is love.

He is a soldier picking through the battlefield aftermath in search of the living, and finding only empty shoes and other things of which he will never be able to speak, not even to his children.

In my own grief, to cope with my own loss and loneliness, a state merely exacerbated by this latest in a lengthy string of things taken and lost and broken, things about which I also have a difficult time speaking, I am reading a novel about a Nigerian refugee, newly arrived in London, chased out of Africa by men with machetes hired by the oil companies to “eliminate barriers” to their exploration of the rich reserve of resources lying underneath the girl’s village. She is a witness to things she should not have seen, and so she and her sister are hunted like wild animals. She escapes, her sister does not. Now, in a foreign land, baffled by the order and cleanliness of it all, swimming in a sea of the smiling faces and strange languages, she does not know where to go or what to do except to put one foot in front of the next, to move forward, just… forward.

Yesterday I finished a book about white Zimbabwean farmers fleeing, and dying, after Mugabe has decided that his only way to retain power is to incite the most desperate of people, the poorest of the poor, to join his mad quest for power by promising them land and riches and influence and a twisted sense of national pride. Instead he creates a place where only a few have anything of value and the rest are plunged into the darkness of a sinking economy with more than 1000 percent inflation, a currency worth nothing, rampant disease, scarce resources and no direction. Blacks and whites suffer alike, refugees in their own country, trapped under the weight of one man’s arrogance, pinned to the wall like dead butterflies that were unable to fly away to brighter skies. But still, they persevere, propping each other up with slices of bread, and gallons of shared petrol, and kindness, and song.

I feel comforted by these stories somehow, the survivors of war, the only ones left alive to tell the story, just as much as I am comforted by the optimism and fierce, belligerent joy of the young couple beside me in seats 20D and 20E.

There is, within each of them—the couple, the husband, the exile and the trapped—a belief that, despite every dodged bullet, despite the blood on the land, at their feet, despite watching friends and family members succumb to the frailty of this life, despite the odds stacked high against them, screaming that happiness is so very fleeting… there can be hope, there is life, there is something stronger here than suffering and despair, greater than flesh, more potent than the most powerful magic… love creeps in and washes over us in a magnificent, booming crest and the ocean that envelopes us does not, in fact, overtake us and deliver us into the belly of the world, but instead carries us forth on wave after wave after wave of shining, spectacular light.

We are all refugees of tragedy, our token paid for the privilege and gift of being human, our bride-price dowry in our union with mortality, fleeing to a place of silence within ourselves, seeking asylum in each other’s arms.

The couple next to me sings a song in Punjabi, one starting a verse and faltering, the other finishing it in a soft, reassuring voice. The girl giggles and kisses him, and he teases her with a wink. They intertwine their fingers and whisper in each other’s ears.

I close my book and press my forehead against the window to take in the view from above. The bulbous clouds pass soundlessly below, spilling over the jagged peaks in an undulating surge, covering the earth with majestic, sheltering calm.