Since it's Valentine's Day tomorrow, everyone wants to talk about love. Now, I don't currently have a boyfriend, a fiance, or a husband, but I do have some things to say about love.
This is love: My two sets of grandparents, both married for over 60 years and still best friends.
This is love: My parents, married for 32 years, complete opposites, but still cracking each other up, quoting Seinfeld and blaming each other for snoring every time we go on a family vacation.
This is love: My Aunt Joanne, who married my uncle in 1999, inheriting an entire family and two in-laws that would live in an apartment attached to her house. She took this all in stride, our family became hers, and when my grandmother started showing signs of dementia, she was there every step, doctor's appointments, taking on all the responsibility as if they were her own parents. When my grandmother died unexpectedly in her sleep last June, Jo was the first person there to comfort my shocked and devastated grandfather, she was the rock of our shaken family, and assumed her role as my grandfather's closest confidante. Through her grief and chaos of family members flying in, she took time to comfort everyone, and take charge of the details of the arrangements to ensure it was just like my Nana would have wanted. She took time to help my sister when she came to visit later in the summer, she was in Europe when Nana passed away and we decided it wasn't necessary for her to come back for the funeral, and she had a hard time processing her grief. Joanne has always been patient, loving and a seamless member of our family, but now she has assumed the role of the matriarch of my family, spending time every day talking to my Grandfather, even after a long commute and a full time job, and kids and grandkids of her own, but after the year my family has had, I have never felt so much love. At Christmas, my grandpa asked my dad to help him wrap a special present he had gotten for Jo. My dad offered to go with him to pick it out, but Grandpa insisted he would do it himself, he just needed help wrapping. Christmas Day was hard for everyone, especially Joanne and Grandpa, but he couldn't wait to give Joanne her gift, a beautiful pearl necklace and bracelet with crystals in it. Through his tears he told her he loves her, which is not something he says often. Retelling the story to us later in the day was painful to tell, and to hear, but my heart wanted to burst with the love that we share, in good times and bad. I am constantly inspired to seek out this kind of unconditional, everlasting love, and I am so lucky that I get to witness it fully in my life.
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