An Unexpected Valentine

So it is Valentine’s Day coming up and I have to say I have very mixed feelings.  It isn’t that I will be ignored---I already have a pink flowered plant in my window that my daughter in law brought by on Saturday.  And I am sure that Teddy will be as thoughtful on Tuesday as he was on our wedding anniversary when he took the day off and we went to Disneyland and then to dinner at the restaurant where Paul and I always celebrated. 

I will miss the fancy sentimental card I always got, the one I would have thought was corny if it hadn't been given to me by someone who loved me.  I will miss wondering if there will be flowers delivered to the office, or a box of dark chocolates at my place at dinner.  I will miss all of that, but I will smile knowing that our three boys will all remember the young women they love and they too will be showered with pink and red hearted love themselves.  I will hear Lynn Seibel singing the song from "The King and I" that he sang at Paul’s memorial service, and I will smile:  .

Don't cry young lovers, whatever you do,
Don't cry because I'm alone;
All of my memories are happy tonight,
I've had a love of my own.
I've had a love of my own, like yours-
I've had a love of my own.

But what startles me is the person, besides Paul,  who keeps joining me when I think about the holiday.  It isn’t Cupid.  It isn’t the boy named Doug in my fourth grade class who gave me a store bought card instead of a valentine out of a classroom box.  It isn’t Bob in 7^th grade.  It isn’t even all the boys who would never have dreamed of giving me a valentine though I dreamt of them all of the time.

One of my Valentines this year is going to be  Margaret Thatcher.  Really.  Margaret Thatcher, as least as she is portrayed by Meryl Streep in the movie “Iron Lady.”   Margaret in the movie is slightly befuddled and often confused.  She can’t always grasp that her husband is gone, having died some years before.  She sees him often and talks to him frequently and hasn’t been able to go through his things as much as her family wishes she would.   But the moment I share with Margaret is in a moment of sudden clarity.  She has gotten up in the middle of the night and she starts madly packing then stopping just a minute to rest.  Sitting in the middle of a pile of trash bags she wistfully asks Dennis’ memory…

“Were you happy?”  After all the years they shared, all they gotten through, all he had to tolerate because of her time as politician and prime minister, after all the years they had lived and loved… she wondered “were you happy?”  And as I see that scene my heart cringes and my eyes moisten because sometimes I ask the same thing…

We don’t know what Dennis would have said.  But I am confident that that if we were to look our Valentines straight in their eyes, our husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters and friends, if we were to look our Valentines straight in the eyes and simply say, “No matter what, from now to forever, I love you very much.,” their answer to Margaret’s question would be ‘Yes.”

For as the Bible says, “Love never ends….faith hope and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love.”