What I Learned About Love One Day

When you are a home health nurse, you don't know what you may find on the first visit. But this experience was one I wanted to remember and I jotted the essence of it when I came home. It was, in fact, what inspired me to start writing some of my nursing stories. The home was in an older part of town, a red brick two story, and one that looked as if the occupants had lived there for a long time, that little children had once played in the yard before growing to adulthood and leaving home. The husband greeted me at the door. Soon I felt the love. When I walked in, she was lying in a hospital bed in the living room, old and bedridden, rigid and staring, with Parkinson's disease. But he saw his wife differently. When he talked with her and looked at her, his eyes were filled with a connection that can be defined only as true love. He talked to me of their years together, and how he, still fit and healthy, must now tend to her physical needs. He spoke to and about her as if she were still the girl he fell in love with. Then I saw it. The young girl was still somewhere inside that almost unresponsive body, and I realized that we are indelibly and forever imprinted when love strikes us. That is how our minds see that person from then on. The imprint forms the basis of our relationship. And that is what I learned about love that day.