Something that just won't leave my mind tonight is the example of my maternal grandparents. My fifteen-year-old idea of love just drops off the map when I see the fruits of their almost sixty-year marriage. Tonight, my grandpa called me to see how I was doing. And when I asked how he was, he told me that he exercises three to five days a week, at the age of eighty, so that he can take better care of my grandma. And then when I asked how she was doing, he said that he has made a chart of all the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, to help her organize in her cancer-ravaged mind who's who in our family. Gone is the notion that you can't choose who you fall in love with....sixty years of service to each other? Decades and decades of choosing, everyday, to work for the other's happiness....he made a chart. He made a chart so that she won't have to wonder, so that she won't have to feel the frustration of forgetting the names of who she loves, the lives she has followed from our births up to now.
Oh, the 15-year-old notion of true love pales in comparison....I had no idea how much bigger, how much deeper it runs.
1 comment:
For all the reasons we love Rae, it's because she can write something like this, and make it feel like home.
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