Last time I wrote about an amazing story of a woman who was, more or less literally, saved by the love of her boyfriend.
Yesterday, I heard an equally touching, though much less happy, story on the NPR program "This American Life." It was an excerpt from the book "Voices from Chernobyl," written about 10 years after the nuclear explosion in that Ukrainian town. An actress read the story of a woman whose husband, a firefighter, was sent into the blast area with no protective equipment. Of course he soon developed deadly radiation sickness and went into the hospital. The hospital staff told the woman, "You must stop thinking that this is your loved one and realize that this is now a radioactive object that can kill you."
Still, she came to visit him. One day she saw on the table next to his bed an orange. He told her he'd been given it as a present and said he wanted her to have it because he knew how much she liked oranges. She was aware that it was dangerous even to touch the contaminated fruit, much less to eat it. But she took it from him. She told how when the two of them would go to sleep together before the blast, he would always hold her hand as he fell asleep. So she held his hand.
She said she did it because she didn't want him to think about death, and how horrible his death was. The story did not say what happened to the woman. So she allowed herself to be poisoned by radiation to keep her husband from being isolated.
This story completely blew me away. If I hadn't heard it, I might have said that only God could love like that. Of course the woman was terrified, but she took her husband's radiation-saturated hand anyway, and held it.
I shared this story, sobbing, first with my significant other, and then with another friend. And today it came to me that part of the reason these two stories hit me so strongly was that my relationship with my partner is the most important thing in my life, and we're not together right now.
I realized that it's OK to make our relationship the most important thing -- more important than work or being pragmatic or anything else -- because it's what I value the most. Because for me, when we're together, everything else is better, even if it's not great.
Love. I really do think it's the most important thing.
i have tears in my eyes. the story of the woman's love is the kind that cuts to my core. more than that, though, is your declaration of not only the love, but of the intense importance that love holds in your own being, for your partner.
ReplyDelete"Because for me, when we're together, everything else is better, even if it's not great." I feel exactly the same way about my partner. Exactly.