One More Day Alive

A few weeks ago, I walked into my corner coffee shop expecting smiles and salutations because it was Valentine’s Day. Instead, half the people in there were down in the dumps because they had nobody to love.

I left the place wondering whether I should be in a bad mood, too. After all, I was single. (Egads!)

Our culture feeds us so much desperation when it comes to love that we all feel like if we don’t have a relationship, we’ve got nothing. But does Cupid have a monopoly on love?

I found my answer the next weekend at a big family gathering at my best friend’s house. His brother-in-law’s mother, Theresa, grew up in war-ravaged Vietnam, where she survived more than a few REAL heartaches.

Love finds a way

She was left behind in 1975 when Saigon fell, while her mother and sisters caught one of the last U.S. helicopters out. A year later, she and her husband and child escaped to Thailand, where they were imprisoned before being transferred into a refugee camp. They found asylum in France for three years before finally making it to America.

For the next 20 years, Theresa lived the American dream, working as a hairdresser and raising two children with her husband. But then it all fell apart. After 25 years of marriage, divorce robbed her of her identity. She wanted — and needed — to get it back.

She spent her vacation that year in France working with the poor at a Benedictine monastery, and it changed her life. Three months later, she left for a month-long retreat at a convent in Chile where she could work at a nearby hospice for the terminally ill.  Theresa shaved them, bathed and dressed them.  She ate with the nuns and lived like a nun, studying and praying.

But still something was missing.  “I was afraid I was going to get sick,” explained Theresa. “There was no real hygiene, no gloves.  I asked God, why do I have to do this? Maybe I can serve God in some other way.”

Theresa found her answer in an old man with sores covering his body. “I could never bring myself to touch him,” recalled Theresa. “Then one day he begged me for help into the tub. I decided to touch him with no gloves.  I washed him, slowly and kindly.  Then I put cream on his body. God came into my heart. I lost my fear and my pain.”

A change of heart

From that day on, dirty diapers, dysentery, the smells, the ghastly sights, none of it bothered her anymore.

When she returned to America, one of her customers, Mrs. Miller, had died. She went to see Mr. Miller to express her condolences and found a shell of a man.

The 83-year-old former economist who still worked as an expert witness was in good shape physically and financially, but after losing his wife of 60 years, he also lost his will to live.

Theresa had an idea. She invited him to Chile with her the next time she went, hoping it would help him like it helped her.  But Mr. Miller was Jewish and felt uncomfortable going to a Catholic convent. He politely declined.

A few months later Theresa headed back to Chile, this time for a year.

At the Mother Teresa Congregation, she tended to 36 handicapped children, feeding them, playing with them and rehabilitating them.  Then she headed off to the Little Sisters of the Poor nursing home for the elderly.  Finally, she cut hair one day a week for the poor in the chapel.

One day, Mr. Miller called. He’d had a change of heart.

He joined her there for two weeks, and just like Theresa, he lived, worked and prayed with the nuns. He cleaned, bathed and fed the weak and the sick.  “When I was in America I felt so old,” he told Theresa one day. “Now I feel young. I want to live again.”

Mr. Miller returned five times that year to work with Theresa.  When he left for the last time, the poor, the hungry and the infirmed all gathered and embraced him.

Theresa returned to Maryland later that year and was asked by Mr. Miller’s daughter to take care of her father full time.  She agreed.

And they both lived happily ever after, with a whole lot of love to show for it.

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