It started 19 years ago with a first glance, when they smiled at each other. That smile touched their hearts and set them aflutter. It was "Love at First Sight" in its most literal sense. They had the blessing of all the elders and their families came together as if they had always been one big unit filled with love, laughter and friendship.
When they became man and wife in the eyes of God, it was simply a re-affirmation of everything they felt inside. How could God have known, that these two individuals, who had never crossed paths before, who had no idea about each other's existence, should be "matched" together in such a manner? They were like two parts of a single whole which got drawn together through the fabric of life to finally become one.
A few years later, she gave him the greatest gift a man could ever ask for... a chance to be an amazing father to a little daughter. To have a chance to hold in his hand, a piece of his heart, his perfect little bundle of joy. She was the essence of their love with parts of both of them.
The years that followed were not easy. Like every couple, they faced the trials and tribulations that life threw at them and all of the different challenges that tested their relationship. But through them all, the one constant that kept them going was that love that they had found in each other.
That love radiated to everyone around them. They celebrated their simple joys, opened their hearts out to everyone who came into their lives. Like every man, woman and child, they built their dream and worked towards making it come true, and all the while, never once forgetting about God, their family and all of the people who needed them. Selfless in their actions, they just continued making this world a better place in their own little ways, for everyone who crossed their paths.
They were unaware that their future had a huge shadow cast on it. The biggest test of all.
The hardest tribulation a heart could ever endure.
Their happy world shook with the tremors of one single blow that fate doled out. In an instant, everything changed.
He got trapped in a world whence he could not reach out, his body broken, unresponsive and dying. His mind hearing her earnest pleas to keep fighting, to not leave her, to not give up. His fingers entwined in hers but not able to clasp on and reassure her that he was there. He was still there.
She cast aside her fears and hung on to every bit of faith, to hold on to him. Everyday, for the next 50 days, she cast her worries outside as she walked to be by his side, as the monitors beeped to tell her that his heart still beat for her. She would talk to him, pray with him, egg him on to keep fighting. And even as his body kept breaking and crumbling from the inside, he held on, only because she asked him to. As things got bleaker, she kept getting stronger, Her prayers to keep him with her, were so strong that, everytime he almost fell off the cliff, he would come back. The men of science were baffled about what still kept him here - no science, no medicine could have sustained that broken body for as long as he did, and yet, they saw this miracle unfold before their eyes day after day. Every night, she'd pray to God to keep him safe for her so she come see him the next morning and pray again. Despite all of the pain and anguish, his body was putting him through, he chose to endure being trapped in that diseased, dying mortal shell only because she needed him. He wouldn't leave her side even though the life force was leaving his body. Even as she watched him wither and become frail she couldn't let go of a hope that, somehow his broken body would become whole again and he would once again, go back to being that man who smiled with his eyes and who kept her safe from everything.
Until one day, when she could no longer deny the pain he was enduring for her sake, when she saw the fight he was putting up in a battle that his body had already lost out to, she decided to do something.
She gave him the greatest gift anyone could ever give someone they love.....
Transcending all of her own selfish desires and needs, she tore through the strings of her heart and let it break into a million shards, so he could be free. She made the one last prayer to God to save him, to do what was right for him. She gave up her love, for the sake of her love. And as if it were the only cue he had been waiting for, the only sign he needed from her, in that very instant, he held God's hand which had been waiting for him all along and he let himself be saved.
They showed God and all of us that true love knows no bounds.... true love isn't about keeping it with you... true love is about enduring... about sacrifice and about letting go...
They will be together once again in time... in a different realm where there would be no mortal shells.... where they would be together happily, ever after.
