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.

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.

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.

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. ”

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.”

He worried,
and she knew it. You don’t hide things from someone who knows
better.

“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?

“Forgave me for a lot of
things.”

“Stood by me.”

And then, good service to those of us who
think giving constructive criticism is our religious calling: “Always
complimentary.”

“Provide everything I ever needed.” Janet McHugh next
wrote.

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.”

The last thing she wrote sums up all the others. I can picture her
adding it thoughtfully to her list. ”Good friend.”

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.

“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?”

“you will,” he says. ”If you love her
enough, you will,” he says. ”If you lo