Hearts and Flowers

Let's face it, in a past life I must have been a jilted lover who went crazed and took that last desperate jump off lover's leap due to unrequited love.

No doubt after successfully gunning down his entire family! I was jilted. Not pathetic.

Why else would I be a hardened skeptic when it comes to love? Why else would I have gotten the dry heaves when I saw the hugely sentimental hearts-and-flowers card ( with a kitschy heart-shaped mirror! ) that my lovey-dovey friends made for each other?


Hearts and Flowers?
But today I saw a touching tableau of tenderness that left me with a queer tickle in the throat. A sweet little something that reminds us that love does endure after all ( despite what the lurid Hollywood scandals might suggest ). Yes, the hardened tin-man actually has a heart!

Today as I made my rounds through the wards, I saw a wife feeding her husband with some steaming porridge. A simple matter of course - and one you'll see quite often in the hospitals - until you find out that she's been doing so for the past ten years after his tragic motorvehicle accident.

Let's face it, not everyone can take care of a paraplegic husband for almost a decade. In these modern age when marriage certs seem to be but a cheap annulment ( and an eager lawyer ) away, it would be easy enough to shirk such a duty crying irreconciliable differences. Very few would even consider shouldering such an irksome baggage, some would even say damaged goods! A partner who's suddenly terrifyingly unable to care for himself, regressing essentially into an infant dependent on the kindness of others.

So how does his wife take care of him so dotingly without shirking even for a moment? Old-fashioned values such as duty, commitment and obligation to her vows perhaps.

But that wouldn't explain the blinding smile on her husband's face as he looks at her. And it wouldn't explain the tender loving care obviously lavished on him. Far from being unkempt and uncared for, his hair was brushed till it shone with not a single hair out of place and his skin was smooth as a baby's. His buttoned-up pyjamas didn't have a single crease on it - obviously bulldozed into submission. Not only that but his exacting wife could recite by rote every medication and every procedure that had been done to him. Practically a medical encylopaedia on his affliction by then.

Asked on how she could it on a daily basis, she only replied simply 'He would have done the same for me.'

But all that didn't impress me as much as what she did as I left the room.

As she got up to leave the room to wash the bowl, she pressed a warm loving kiss on his cheek. There were tears shining in his eyes.

After ten years.

Now that's love.