I found "True Love" in the Nursing Home

True love. This phrase or wording often is overused and abused. I likened it to be hollow and empty with a Hollywood-esque fake feel to it. It feels fake because so many times we have the perfect vantage point to watch countless marriages or relationships crumble even under the auspices of "true love."

This "happily ever after, go live in a castle" or prince charming or Cinderella story has been beaten into us as little kids and retold to our kids as we become adults. Even now, its just the idiotic redundancy of far-fetched romance movies that do nothing but reinforce this distorted view of "true love" and what it really means.

Well, I found true love. I discovered it while not actively participating in it if that makes any sense. But I ran face first into it as I walked down the hallway with the faint smell of urine in the air of my local nursing home. As I made my rounds, I noticed three elderly men that looked nice and well groomed. You could tell that they were not residents. I watched them as they came each morning and dutifully walked to respective rooms.

Inside these rooms, lay definitely not Sleeping Beauty but an ugly grotesque fleshly shell of their spouse eaten with cancer or one whose brain is controlled by the jerky spastic movements that only Parkinson's can. They no longer able to function nor talk. They wet themselves as all bodily function is lost. Its a sad horrible picture. But everyday they come.

They come and check their respective wives for sores, problems, and they talk to them even though they probably cant hear him. His deep concerned look mixed with genuine tender love strikes at the heart of me. I watch as he comforts her with his soothing familiar voice when shes scared. I watch as he pushes her in a wheel chair up and down the hallways relentlessly all day to keep her calm and busy and her shaking at bay. I watch as he stands guard with familiar maroon coffee cup in hand and he witnesses firsthand helplessly as his Love withers away....and it's in that moment I realized that's "true love."

There is a pureness about his love. No agenda. No ulterior motive. Just this calm, relentless, tender, pure love shared between mates. He doesn't ever leave her. He loves her. He still is in love with her. She is still the Apple of his eye even as her body literally breaks down in front of his eyes and she's still "buttercup or beautiful" to him.

That's real true love. Seeing one at their worst and loving them even the more. So while the movies are fun and romantic...Ill take the boring, urine smelling, nursing home love any day because that's the love I want and that's the man I want to be.....always there with that unmistakable tender loving gaze standing guard over my true love.