Immortality

My intention in going to see her was to accept that she was dying and to say goodbye, but I find that I can't.

She wants to keep living and where there's life, or a desire for life, there's hope. First there's that, this indestructible hope of mine. I've always been this way and I don't think anything will change that. Where love is involved I hold fast until I'm certain that there's no way back.

Secondly, her inner strength gave me greater strength. She's a teacher through and through, by trade and by nature. I saw her ability to laugh through pain, to chuckle as if we were sitting in a cafe watching the world go by, commenting that she needs to watch her waistline and this is why she only ate three strawberries in one day. We joked about the benefits to a lady's complexion of lying in bed for days and weeks on end, how it irons out all the wrinkles and turns back the hands of time.

I saw her transform in front of my eyes from a sick old lady, to a young giggling girl, whose eyes sparkled with life and whose wicked sense of humour made us all laugh. All this through receiving love and knowing she's loved. Although I haven't achieved what I set out to achieve, I've been given something worth so much more. We're all going to die one day and we have no idea when that day will come, regardless of how sick or not we might be. The only thing we can do is to accept that our days are numbered and to fill them with as much love as we can.

I have felt, a number of times over the last day and a half, seeing her transformed for flickering moments and even for minutes at a time, that I've discovered the secret to immortality and it's absurdly simple: love.

I don't know what will happen in the next few days or even tomorrow, but yesterday she said to me, "I will survive. I have decided." Then she paused and said, "At least tonight, anyway." I went in this morning, early, to kiss her goodbye and I left saying I would see her soon, because I have a very strange sense of knowing that I will. I don't have any answers, but I feel as if I know something very precious that I didn't know before, so all I can say for sure is that everything's always okay in the end; and if it's not okay, then it's not the end.