Sometimes, it is good to be reminded of what love means.
Is love timeless? Is love selfless? Is love true? Is love hopeful? Is love complete? Is love all you need?
Social Affair Correspondent Janice Tai tells a story about love this morning that might just answer the above questions....that is, for those earnestly seeking for answers.
It started with a date in 2011. Ms Koh Soh Kuan (then 41) and Mr Pang Ming Kwong (then 50) met at a cafe in Pan Pacific Hotel and a year later (2011), they went steady.
For Ms Koh, it was her first relationship and it was Mr Pang’s second. At that time, he was an auditor and she was an executive in a reinsurance company.
In their eight years together, Ms Koh wanted to tie the knot but Mr Pang would tell her “that many marriages ended up in divorces and (Ms Koh) was disappointed, but (she) know marriage cannot be forced.”
Two years ago, Mr Pang was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and doctors gave him a few years to live.
Sadly, Mr Pang passed away on 28 December 2018. It was however a passing that love could not let go.
Ms Koh was with him all the way. Her love gave all. She kept nothing for herself. He was all she could think about during this trying time.
She was a Buddhist and he a Christian and both of them prayed for a miracle in their own earnest way.
On Nov 9 last year, after he was hospitalised for the third and final time, he acknowledged her as his “dear wife”.
Ms Koh said: “I was very touched because he often said in the past, he is not like youngsters who know how to sweet-talk, or give flowers and gifts. Hearing him call me that was very valuable to me.”
Janice wrote that “from then on, the couple began holding hands at his bed every day. She told him interlocking their fingers would symbolise being Husband and wife forever and he smiled and nodded his head in happiness.”
Before all this, Mr Pang kept a stoic view about romance and marriage. I guess he didn’t buy too much into covenantal love thinking that institutional passion are for the young.
But in the midst of his medical ordeal, he called upon Ms Koh in Nov 17 and asked for her hand in marriage.
He said: “I love you, will you marry me?” And he often told her this: “If you are with me, I think I can live for a few more years.”
Mr Koh said that she was “very surprised and happy” when he proposed to her. She said: “I did not think about he brevity of time left when he proposed. It did not matter, whether it is a day, a week or a month, because we loved each other. Love shouldn’t be defined by time or what you get from each other.”
The touching part of their journey was on the engagement day. Ms Koh wore “a white dress” and Mr Pang had a white T-shirt on. “While the nurses sang A Thousand Years from Twilight movie, tears streamed down Ms Koh’s face.”
Mr Pang passed away at 1:21 am on Dec 28 with Ms Koh and his loved ones by his bedside.
In the interview with Janice, Ms Koh said: “Can I go and register my marriage with him on that day? I miss him so much and I want us to be husband and wife forever.”
Lesson? One.
At that time when he asked for her hand in marriage, Ms Koh “realised it could be his way of showing his final gift of love to her.”
Here I wonder, what is love to the unmarried, the married and the married with kids all grown up?
Personally, and some may disagree, I do not think all couple enter marriage with love as their overriding reason. Like they said, it is “complicated”.
I believe some are quietly turned off by that four letter word (“love”), especially the men who wear the pants in the house.
For them, love is impractical. It doesn’t bring back the bacon. It doesn’t put food on the table. Too much of it makes one vulnerable, weak and possibly needy.
What’s more, in a society where marriage is often seen as some form of rite of passage, just like getting through streaming, PSLE and GCE levels and securing a career to pay off the housing loan and feeding the kids and the whole sapping cycle repeats itself, some unknowingly and unwittingly enter the long term marital union with a short term mindset.
And if all that is about going through the motion, ticking off the boxes as time drags on in a marriage, then what does love demand of us then, especially the husbands? What part does love play in a marriage, even as the kids come?
Do we often take what is a good thing for granted and become too obsessed with what is never meant to be forever? For some of us, will we ever get it right the second time round, after surviving a personal trial that shakes our most coveted foundation we think can never be shaken?
Alas, I believe love does not own us anything. It is often optional in a marriage. But it is also always there in a marriage - it never left.
We men try to cast it off. We tell ourselves to put aside “playthings” of courtship since we have already got the girl. The race is over. The competition is won. The love is done, spent.
But we often forget that a marriage is about a lifetime, and love in my view is never retired in this union. We often do not know what love is until it is all we have at a time when nothing else really matters.
So, you can take love for granted in a marriage, but when you need it most, it may just be the only thing that matters in your world (as the love of Ms Koh and Mr Pang has shown me).
Indeed, where there is great love, there are always miracles, and the first and final miracle is always the enduring transformation of the heart. And at times, we may be called to let go of a life, but by then, the heart is changed forever by love.
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