她翻开另一页，补充道“他热情、幽默、善良、稳重”。对于这个与她共同生活并相爱了大半辈子的人，她这样写道：“他总会在我需要的时候陪伴我。”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 My friend John McHugh is always telling me things, things that younger men need wiser, older men to tell them. Things like whom to trust, how to love, how to live a good life.5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 Not long ago John lost his wife, Janet, to cancer. God knows she was a fighter, but in the end the disease won their eight-year battle.5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 One day John pulled a folded paper from his wallet. He’d found it, he told me, while going through drawers in his house. It was a love note, in Janet’s handwriting. It looked a little like a schoolgirl’s daydream note about the boy across the way. All that was missing was a hand-drawn heart and the names John and Janet. Except this note was written by the mother of seven children, a woman who had begun the battle for her life, and very probably was within months of the end.5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 It was also a wonderful prescription for holding a marriage together. This is how Janet McHugh’s note about her husband begins:” Loved. Cared. Worried. ”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 As quick with a joke an John is, apparently he didn’t joke with his wife about cancer. He’d come home, and she’d be in one of the moods cancer patients get lost in, and he’d have her in the car faster than you can say DiNardo’s, her favorite restaurant. “Get in the car,” he’d say,” I’m taking you out to dinner.”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 He worried, and she knew it. You don’t hide things from someone who knows better.5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 “Helped me when I was sick.” is next. Maybe Janet wrote her list when the cancer was in one of those horrible and wonderful remission periods, when all is as it was—almost—before the disease, so what harm is there in hoping that it’s behind you, maybe for good?5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 “Forgave me for a lot of things.”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 “Stood by me.”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 And then, good service to those of us who think giving constructive criticism is our religious calling: “Always complimentary.”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 “Provide everything I ever needed.” Janet McHugh next wrote.5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 Then she’d turned the man she had lived with and been in love with for the majority of her life. She’d written:” Always there when I needed you.”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 The last thing she wrote sums up all the others. I can picture her adding it thoughtfully to her list. ”Good friend.”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 I stand beside John now, unable even to pretend that I know what it feels like to lose someone so close. I need to hear what he has to say, much more than he needs to talk.5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 “John,” I ask,” how do you stick by someone through 38 years of marriage. “let done the sickness too? How do I know I’d have what it takes to stand by my wife if she got sick?”5Qd中国英语学习网 5Qd中国英语学习网 “you will,” he says. ”If you love her enough, you will.”
