Can love last? Man holding hand of his dying wife gives me hope

By David McElroy · September 7, 2016

It’s easy to be cynical about love today. It’s easy to conclude that love can’t last. And then something comes along that makes you think maybe love can last — connection can last — until the very end. Just maybe.

Nine days ago, a woman posted this picture on Reddit. Her simple caption said, “My Grandma, 96, with my Grandpa, 100, hours before her death this weekend. 77 years of marriage.”

I don’t know where they lived or what their names are. I’m not sure that even matters. The story is universal. The desire to be loved is universal. The desire to have someone to hold onto — in honest connection — is universal.

Most marriages I see are pretty terrible. Most relationships I see are just as bad. Most people don’t know themselves and they don’t know each other. They marry the wrong person. They live entirely different lives that are connected only by children, if at all. And most of them refuse to do anything meaningful to end their misery and learn how to make better choices.

Most of the couples I see make me cynical and I find myself fearing that I might be one of the many whose choices and circumstances leave him alone and unloved at the end.

But this man and woman were together since they were roughly 19 and 23. They would have married in 1939. Imagine getting married and starting a family at that point — right as the world was hurling itself into a terrifying world war.

I have no idea what their relationship was like along the way. Maybe they had trouble. Maybe they weren’t always happy. I assume they had ups and downs, just as the happiest couples have.

All I can know is that they loved each other enough to want to be near one another as she died. It would have been easy for them to be in different rooms or at least beds that were physically apart. But one of them or both of them chose to be close to each other as she was slipping away.

And in her final hours, he held her hand for a last time.

I want that.

I want something real. I want to believe that when someone say, “I love you,” it’s something real. Something that lasts. I want for a woman to be the center of my life and I want to be the center of hers. I want our children — and maybe even grandchildren — to be close extensions of the love and closeness they see in us.

I don’t want perfection. I don’t want a fairy tale.

I want love. I want connection.

I want what I imagine when I see this couple — love and connection that can survive and thrive. Those are the things that matter, not the things people prioritize instead — not money, not ego, not other people’s opinions.

Love matters — connection matters — more than anything else. I want what I see here when the end comes for me.

Share on Social Networks

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

Related Posts