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When a man loves a woman
她翻开另一页，补充道“他热情、幽默、善良、稳重”。对于这个与她共同生活并相爱了大半辈子的人，她这样写道：“他总会在我需要的时候陪伴我。”
My friend John McHugh is always telling me things, things that younger men
need wiser, older men to tell them. Things like whom to trust, how to love, how
to live a good life.
Not long ago John lost his wife, Janet, to cancer. God knows she was a
fighter, but in the end the disease won their eight-year battle.
One day John pulled a folded paper from his wallet. He’d found it, he told
me, while going through drawers in his house. It was a love note, in Janet’s
handwriting. It looked a little like a schoolgirl’s daydream note about the boy
across the way. All that was missing was a hand-drawn heart and the names John
and Janet. Except this note was written by the mother of seven children, a woman
who had begun the battle for her life, and very probably was within months of
the end.
It was also a wonderful prescription for holding a marriage together. This
is how Janet McHugh’s note about her husband begins:” Loved. Cared. Worried.
”
As quick with a joke an John is, apparently he didn’t joke with his wife
about cancer. He’d come home, and she’d be in one of the moods cancer patients
get lost in, and he’d have her in the car faster than you can say DiNardo’s, her
favorite restaurant. “Get in the car,” he’d say,” I’m taking you out to
dinner.”
He worried, and she knew it. You don’t hide things from someone who knows
better.
“Helped me when I was sick.” is next. Maybe Janet wrote her list when the
cancer was in one of those horrible and wonderful remission periods, when all is
as it was—almost—before the disease, so what harm is there in hoping that it’s
behind you, maybe for good?
“Forgave me for a lot of things.”
“Stood by me.”
And then, good service to those of us who think giving constructive
criticism is our religious calling: “Always complimentary.”
“Provide everything I ever needed.” Janet McHugh next wrote.
Then she’d turned the man she had lived with and been in love with for the
majority of her life. She’d written:” Always there when I needed you.”
The last thing she wrote sums up all the others. I can picture her adding
it thoughtfully to her list. ”Good friend.”
I stand beside John now, unable even to pretend that I know what it feels
like to lose someone so close. I need to hear what he has to say, much more than
he needs to talk.
“John,” I ask,” how do you stick by someone through 38 years of marriage.
“let done the sickness too? How do I know I’d have what it takes to stand by my
wife if she got sick?”
“you will,” he says. ”If you love her enough, you will.” |
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发表于 2016-7-10 11:31:52