There is love. Sometimes powerful as a wonderful sunrise. Sometimes on a vacation from the two of you. Yet, it never leaves for good, even as the doorway to heaven awaits one of you.
Remarkable thing this Love. How transcendent, how forever it can be. No scientific study could ever nail it. No philosophical treatise could explain it. It just happens and guess what? It never leaves the two who experience it together. That is love.
There is dying. The prettiest autumn leaves of orange and purple and gold all find their ending on some concrete street or winter’s lawn. Their hue is but a memory until their descendants appear the next Spring. Yet, unlike Mother Nature true love never dies. It cannot. It’s energy is too electric for even the sins of ego.
Once upon a time a couple had this love for over 60 years, with all the toils and shortcomings that pushed hard to disconnect them from one another. They survived it all and remained with each other until the one of them, the wife, met death in some hospital room miles away. The man, who awaited word while sitting in his wheelchair in a nursing home lobby, began to sob when given the sad news. I remembered how the water escaped from his eyes as if the fire hydrant in his head just flew open.
Sitting in the room of my beloved as she struggled with the constant pain of her disease, chained to the Hospice bed like a prisoner begging for release. As she nodded into her narcotic sleep I could only lower my head in my tired hands and cry like a baby. As the water ran from my eyes like rain through a letter box during a sudden storm, I remembered that beaten old man, my father, when the love of his life was gone.
Leaving her room, I began to ponder many thoughts. I then recalled all the reports of the thousands of Palestinians and soon to be thousands of Iranians and Lebanese who were also dying. One woman in a hospice bed struggling with death should be the inspiration for those of us who ‘Know Better’ to stop the evil before it breaks our nation’s moral compass completely.
Death be not proud!
PA Farruggio
April 2026