When I saw my father yesterday he was despondent, feeling abandoned and talking about how he was going to die in the hospital bed where he had been since September 29.
"Everyone else goes home after a day or two here, but they keep me. They will never send me home! I am bored to death and I worry about mother. She doesn't like to be alone, you know, and I don't like to leave her alone either. I miss her."
The two met when my father was 15 and my mother was 16. They married in april 1950 and since then have never been much away from each other, except for their various hospital stays in recent years.
As far as I can remember my parents have always shown their love for each other in an unassuming but highly visible way, except for a short period nearly thirty years ago when I was in my early teens.
As far as I and my older sister (who was married and had moved away by then) have been able to piece together from what we remember and overheard, my father must have had a short romantic fling at the office. When my father broke it off after a few weeks the woman felt obliged to call my mother to inform her of what had been going on.
I remember my mother crying a lot and my father going around and looking like a whipped dog. At the time it felt like this went on for an eternity, but in hindsight it cannot have been for longer than two months until they found their way back to each other. At first very tentatively and carefully but soon their love flowed again and filled the whole family with joy and reassurance that everything was still well in the world.
I remembered that time when I saw them together today. Both radiating with happiness at seeing and touching each other and for being together again.
For some reason I started singing a rewritten stanza from The twelve days of Christmas to myself in the car on my way home, again and again and again... "two turtle doves and a son in a virtual reality" (Yeah, I know the words don´t fit the music well - but I did not receive the Nobel Prize in Literature this year either.)
