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Susan Heywood
TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
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True and Lasting Love - A Rare and Precious Thing
Those words were very lovely and sounded good, but I wonder if they are 100 % true ?
If they are then Love is a very rare thing indeed.
Thinking it over, I have seen one example of a totally selfless, ever giving Love, in all my life, and it was the love my Mummy had for my Daddy.
When my younger sister and I were still small, we used to get woken up at night by the sounds of our parents arguing, mostly about Money, or the lack of it rather. It frightened us both, but my sister more than me. We hid inside the wardrobe in my room, hugging one another and crying at the sounds, night after night.
We often discussed, did they love each other at all? We never saw them kiss or hug. We reasoned, with the wisdom of children, that they must have made love at least twice, because here we were to prove it, but they were certainly not loving each other now.
Years passed, and I was already divorced, my sister had run away from her husband after he accused her of having an affair with a work colleague, which she did not have. Our parents were still together.
More years passed, and Daddy was now very old and weak. War injuries and diseases caught in places like India had taken their toll, as well as the years, and after a bout of pneumonia his brain had been oxygen starved, and he was no longer all there. Mummy lay beside him to keep him warm every night, though he was doubly incontinent now, and washed him in the morning and fed him like a child. She did this for over a year, until the doctor told her that he should be taken into a hospital to be given medicines he could not be given at home, and he was only there for three days before he died.
And Mother declared, "Now I can travel !" I had been working abroad for twenty years, in various countries, and was now married again, to a GERMAN of all things!
Mummy had always wanted to travel, but Daddy had always refused to take her abroad, declaring "Abroad is bloody !" Based on his army service in Germany between the wars and in India during the Raj, I suppose to him it was. Finally she came to visit me, and we went to Switzerland, and to France, and to Italy. My sister and her husband, reconciled and together again, took her to Spain on holiday, and she loved travelling.
But she missed Daddy, and she pined away, and at 89 she passed away, from cancers started in her lungs through passive smoking (Dad used to roll his own and smoke all the time and would not give it up, despite all the warnings from doctors and the government) This time I was determined to be there for her, ( I flew in from Austria for my Daddy but was too late as he was dead before I got there and the funeral was in a church because my sister and her husband had joined some clappy happy christinsane group, the preacher knew nothing about Dad and the whole service smelled of incincerity and lies.) My Mummy died with me holding her hand, and the funeral was one in which the person running the service read out all the funny things that happened to her over the years and her favorite jokes - she was a concert pianist and a flapper in the 1920s, and a very liberated lady. My Sister and I wrote them all down and she read them for us, because we would have been unable to without weeping. Everybody laughed so much, and even the lady priest afterwards told us that it had been the best funeral she had ever attended.
There are many kinds of love, possibly as many as there are lovers.
Briar