COUNTLESS poems and paeans have been written about love. From the youthful, joyous love like the one expressed in one of Solomon's songs: 'Come away, my love, and be like a gazelle/Or like a young stag on the spice-laden mountains' to the uplifting sentiment in the Josh Groban hit song: 'You are the wind beneath my wings ...lifting me higher.... Nothing else moves the human heart like love does.' CDs that sell best are invariably love collections. Light, romantic cinematic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle and My Greek Wedding become unexpected movie hits.
Love is something easy: If it feels like a soft comfortable pair of blue jeans, you know you have it. Sometimes it hits you between the eyes. This will need some adjusting and you really have to evaluate it. Sometimes it only hits you in your groin. That's lust. But the more we sing about love, read about it, watch it unfold in the cinema and our home LCD screens, the higher our divorce rates get, and even higher the legal abortions among our young. Finding a reason for divorce seems so easy these days. A friend who is a marriage counsellor told me that a woman wanted a separation because her husband was snoring too loudly. It is as if true love has been suddenly relegated to the realm of pop culture while it lies wounded on the ground of reality.
But is it? Should one expect love to be akin to the grand sweeps of passion in Gone With The Wind, or comparable to the aching emptiness in Casablanca, or the cold lyrical love in Dr Zhivago, for it to qualify as true love? Or is the greatest love to be found in the little gestures that one person shows for his or her partner? I was moved when I read how one of Singapore's founding fathers, the late S Rajaratnam, expressed his love for his late wife. Fighting off Alzheimer's disease, he wrote little notes to himself. One note found under his wife's photo read: 'This is my beloved wife Piroska, whom I married in London, and who died in 1989.' Or did you not notice the way Mrs Lee quietly reached out with her hand to comfort a clearly distressed Minister Mentor during the wake ceremony for Rajaratnam?
On a happier note, I was touched when Dick Lee's mother, Auntie Liz, held the hands of her husband, and, looking into Uncle Kip's eyes, sang unabashedly her own version of the old Platters' hit song: 'Or-Nee you, can make my ...'
'Or-Nee' is a very sweet yam desert that happens to be one of Uncle Kip's favourite Teochew dishes. They were celebrating their 50th anniversary together, a truly wonderful couple. Love such as these is true love.
Yet, I must ask: What love can be greater and truer than that of a man who willingly dies that others might live?
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