The long haul

      I can't claim to have much wisdom. It's obvious that I make mistake after mistake in my personal, financial and spiritual life. However, I do know one thing: True loves stay with you for the long haul.
      It's easy to have that first rush of passion, that glorious feeling when your beloved can do nothing wrong, where every single thing that she/he does is perfect. So she peppers her speech with profanity? So he eats with his mouth open? So she cries enough to start a flood? So he wears clothing that the homeless would discard? None of that matters because she/he is so wonderful that all the imperfections blur in your beloved's glory.
      But let's give it a few months. Let's get to that point where you can't stand her cat, you can't tolerate his mother, you can't stomach another one of her wholly organic dinners, where you dream of holding a pillow over his face to smother his snores. That's the beginning of the long haul. If it's truly love, you'll make it past that. You'll learn to accept the faults, and hopefully your love will learn to accept yours.
      But then you discover your beloved has cancer. Or MS. Or a thousand other diseases that reduce their victims to unlovely wrecks. No quiet wistful dying as on TV, but a gut-wrenching battle for survival where you clean up vomit and bedpans and hold grimly on, where a single laugh is a hard-fought victory.
      That's the long haul. Some people make it through it. Some people don't.
      Friday, a middle-aged man came into my office wanting to talk about my company's product. As we talked, he told me that his wife was in a hospice. She'd been fighting cancer for a couple of years now. Because I have that kind of face and maybe because I was a total stranger, he started to share their battle for her survival. He told of long hours at the hospital, he told of struggling to care for her at home, he told of losing their house because they had no health insurance and he couldn't get help from the government agencies unless he was destitute. He had tears in his eyes as he talked. I gave him a box of tissues.
      And then he told me that the doctors said her cancer was terminal and that they said all they could do was help her die less painfully. But then he stopped for a long moment.
      "I don't believe it," he said. "She doesn't believe it." They chose to keep fighting. "I can't live without her," he said. "I know people think that after she's gone, I'll be able to go on with my life. What they don't understand is that she is my life."
      We finished our business. He didn't buy my product as our price was too high. He thanked me for listening. He shook my hand and left, going down the street to his truck, heading back to the hospice and his true love, returning to the long haul.