The following is a prior blog post that I wrote over the summer for my parents.
The Princess Bride has been one of my all time favorite movies since I can remember. It’s a complex story of adventure, excitement, and true love. There are about a dozen profound messages in the film, but as a young boy, most of the deeper themes went way over my head. Mostly I just enjoyed the cheesy humor and poorly choreographed action scenes, not recognizing the wisdom of the movie. My favorite scene occurs right after Princess Buttercup pushes her kidnapper down a steep hill. As he tumbles down, he reveals that he is actually her true love in disguise. This hardly makes sense unless you have seen TPB, but I don’t have much time to explain. Anyways, the moment that she realizes who he is, she immediately throws herself down after him.
First off, this is ridiculous and makes absolutely no sense. Princess Buttercup could have totally walked down that hill, or at the very least she could have crawled. What if she broke her neck? What if there were chiggers in the grass? It was her fault that he fell, and she does love him, but is it really necessary to show no regard for her own comfort or safety by plummeting down after him?
Well, no it isn’t necessary, but it’s one of the best metaphors for true love that I can possibly imagine. About two hours ago, I finished watching Love and Other Drugs. Essentially, Jake Gyllenhaal falls in love with Anne Hathaway who has early-onset Parkinson’s, and he’s a player, and she has attachment issues, and they both come to realize that although their love will be radically different because of her illness, he is willing to follow her down that road. What a sappy Hollywood drama am I right?
Except this movie ended up hitting a little closer to home than I expected. The truth is that over the past four weeks I have witnessed many couples going through the exact same thing, with a slightly different disease. As I watched my mom undergo treatment for her Multiple Sclerosis, I also watched many other couples whose lives would never quite be the same. For some couples, the disease means loading and unloading a wheelchair every single time they ride in a car together. For others, it means learning to cope with severe anxiety, loss of mental faculty, and a dramatic change-up in how chores are distributed. In almost all cases, their very presence here in Mexico means weeks of missed work, tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and a significant emotional strain on their marriage. This is not what I had imagined love to look like. Somehow, they are all happily falling downhill alongside one another.
Perhaps the couple that has illuminated the most for me on this subject fell in love sometime around 1989. They were married in ’94, and had three babies in ’96, ’99, and ’01. He worked in sales and she was a teacher. They grew older, chubbier, and happier. Laugh lines began to grow across their faces. Sometimes they had money, but most of the time they worked to make ends meet. They may not have always had everything, but they had their family and they usually had their health (wear sunscreen people) until they didn’t. He lost his hair early on, but then some twenty years, two dozen doctor’s visits, one MS diagnosis, and four rounds of chemo later, she lost hers too. It’s kinda funny how both my parents look like thumb-thumbs now.
I am certain that MS was never a part of their plan. Young Shannon and Young Travis probably expected life to be hard and marriage to be tough and blah blah blah. Except, when they vowed, “for better, for worse… in sickness and in health,” I don’t think it really crossed their mind that a neurodegenerative disease would be included in that picture.
My mom is truly courageous, and she has been for years. Before taking this leap of faith to seek medical treatment in a foreign country, she spent years quietly taking shots every evening at 8 pm. For a moment just consider what it must have been like to stick a needle in your body every day for years without getting a single day off, all while the clock ticks on how long before another attack. Of course that was before she chose to undergo HSCT, where things got even more intense. She will always be a hero to me, and my entire life I will remember her grace and grit in the face of her MS. It sure sucks to get pushed down a hill for no reason, but at least she does it gracefully.
The key, however, was watching my dad throw himself headfirst after her. In these last seven years, especially in these last three months, my father has proven to be every bit of the man a son hopes his father will be. Too often he gets overlooked, and too often we take it for granted that he has chosen to actively love her through it all. Even tonight, 500 miles away my dad was buying cleaning supplies, scrubbing out our bathrooms, and installing a clean air filter to make sure my mom is healthy while her immune system recovers. All of this, mind you, is completely above and beyond what he is required to do before she comes home.
If it had been the other way around, I know the results would be the same. They will always fight, argue, make-up and love/hate each other. It’s too much fun for them to stop at this point. What matters is that they are both completely willing to put aside their own happiness and comfort for each other. Love is often messy, complicated and strenuous. It is also beautiful, inspiring, and it makes life worth living. Crucially, it is also not confined to marriages either.
This epitome of love can present itself in all relationships, from best friends to siblings to grandparents. We all hope to be capable of (and sometimes benefit from) love in this degree. There are daughters that spend every Saturday visiting a parent with Alzheimer’s. There are parents that adapt their lifestyle for a child born with a severe disability. There are Wounded Warriors coming home to their families every day, in the prime of their life, trying to manage new prosthetics. In a world with so much pain, almost every one of us will be given an opportunity to take on the burdens of another; hopefully out of love and not out of duty. Thankfully, my parents have shown me what it means to really commit to that ideal.
I don’t know much about being married, and I don’t have any kids of my own. My only experience comes through observation. In this capacity, I’ve been blessed to have so many wonderful examples to follow. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of poor decisions that I can make while trying to do right by those that I love. Perfection is unattainable. Shortcoming is inevitable. If all else fails, I just hope that one day my wife will know that there is no hill too steep, too rocky or too high that I will not fall down alongside her.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that when you get the chance, and you see your loved one begin the descent down their own mountain, go ahead and swan-dive off that sucker because they’ll love you even more at the bottom.
