I don’t think I really understood just how much my father loved my mother until I saw him argue with a trauma care specialist in the ICU.
Marriage is hard, for this I’m sure. Not because I’ve been married and have experience, but because one can assess the strains in voice, body language, and silence between couples — oftentimes understanding what is not being said. I’ve learned to understand what was not being said between my parents and to leave it alone.
My mother suffered a severe stroke and our lives will never be the same again. Like most mothers, she’s the core part of our family. One can certainly tell the difference when you walk into our home because it’s become uncomfortably quiet and very cold.
Before leaving Paris, I saw one of my best friends, Giorgio. Life made it so that he was the right person at the right time — the one that needed to prepare me for what I was about to encounter when I arrived at the hospital. As always, he was meticulous, compassionate, and thorough. He wasn’t letting me cave to nativity or pride for this was going to be a mess, and I was going to suffer — but with the right tools, and the right support, I could endure this.
And so, here we are enduring.
Watching my father care for my mother during this time has made me realize that I have been looking at love in the wrong way for so many years. I believe an unspoken truth about marriage (or the reasons why people get married) is to have someone to look after them — essentially, to be there in their toughest of times when no one else has the bandwidth to do so. This concept has shaken me for a simple reason: we don’t usually go into relationships preparing for the worst and assessing the man or woman in front of us as capable of enduring the worst.
Or do we?
I know that I have not. Naively so, I’m a lover of love and a hopeless romantic. I have never entered into a relationship thinking of worst-case scenarios like a partner losing a job, having to deal with a parent who has cancer or even my own mortality. In reality, my judgment has been skewed in the here and now like most of us, because that is just what we see.
But it is precisely those things that test a relationship, that uncover or deter our patience, and ultimately, make clear our true needs in partnership.
I once decided to spend the rest of my life with a man I loved, and in the early parts of the relationship, kept ignoring a deep-seated feeling that he would find challenges in life difficult to face. It’s not a very nice thing to say about an ex, but, I was in love, and like many people, I assumed that we would “cross that bridge when we got to it.”
We got to the bridge and only I crossed it.
In her tender state, my mom has not been able to talk, eat, move, or open her eyes. My mother is a fabulous hothead. A career woman, a dedicated wife, and a committed parent. I have never been able to go a week without her asking about my health, or asking if any of my friends have eaten that day. She’s the first one up on a Saturday morning because she likes to do my dad’s laundry in peace; the one who inquires about all my colleagues, and personally for me, the only one who believed that I could be a writer — nurturing my gift, oftentimes at the expense of her marriage.
This is why I am deeply moved watching my father love her in sickness. I can’t imagine what he feels like, or the kind of tears he cries in the privacy of their bedroom when he returns and she is not there. I don’t think he ever thought he’d see his wife as lifeless as she has been these past few days. I have no idea where he has summoned that benevolent strength, that authority, and power to protect his wife, for he has shown my siblings and I what love is.
As I sit and watch him cover her cold feet, or gently brush the hair out of her face — or when I realize he hasn’t eaten properly in days and has been sleeping in the armchair by her bed every single night — I ask myself: do we have what it takes? Do I have what it takes?
Because the love and care that I am witnessing is not normal — at least not in this day and age.
I am not pessimistic by nature, but nurture seems to have played a huge role in how I perceive love and commitment. They say that girls learn the greatest love lessons from their father — specifically, in the way in which he treats their mother. I have never loved my father more than I have in these moments, watching him be vulnerable yet stoic. I have also never been so sure that selflessness is the greatest key to my heart.
Relationships, marriage — whatever arrangement floats your boat — are all good and well when everything goes to plan and we’re taking shiny pictures of ourselves. We rarely think about things going south. It is tragic that a situation such as this has befallen my family, and consequently changed my perception of marriage, but I am grateful that it has. In his darkest hour, my father has shed a light for all of us. For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part — he meant every last word — and in her current state, I know that my mom knows that he has never left her side.