it's your birthday, mom

Hey mom,

It's the 7th of January, 2014. Last time we celebrated together, it was 2001. Kind of crazy, huh? We had organised a surprise party for you, and I guess we all knew it would be your last. You never had big birthday parties as a kid --you always told me how your brother and sister both had birthdays in December, and then there was Christmas, and then New Years, and by the time your birthday came no one really had the energy to do anything, so it was called "eid el tlet baraneet" (the 3-hats party) because the only people there was you and your siblings.

I didn't always have presents for you; mostly drawings or cards or something I made myself. But I always had letters. And I figure I can still do that, write to you on your birthday.

You would've been 59 today. You never wanted us to know that, your real age, and for as long as I can remember you always turned 33 and that's how you'll always remain in my world. You would've been the proud mother of a 20-year-old son who is off to college in Montreal, studying environmental science and in love with sports and nature, just like you. I can imagine you two would have had a hell of a time exploring mountains and discussing global warming. You would've been the proud mother of a 24-year old daughter who is a graphic designer, just like you were, and who could've taught you how to do it all on photoshop (no, they don't use pencils and papers to draw logos anymore...).

I close my eyes, and I imagine I would have taken you out to lunch today, just like I did 13 years ago; and we would have talked about my plans, my wanting to move, the book I'm writing and why I keep getting my heart broken and you would've probably had some tough love in there for me to snap me back into place. Of course, I would've probably spent the entire time talking about me, because that's what kids do, right? Just like I'm doing now. It's your birthday, and all I can do is talk to you about myself.

I will take a moment and say something about you though. I found it in the letter I wrote you that last birthday you were still around. I wrote: "The only thing I can give you today that matters are my words. You will always be my mother. The years go by, things happen that we don't expect, and all the tears we cry wont change anything. So let's look at the world positively, isn't that what you always say?"
 It is what you always said. Even sick, even dying; and I will never forget that.

Happy birthday mom, wherever you are now.

a love letter from the grave

Love letters. Something that seems improbable to get today, in the age of email, sms, whatsapp, audio-notes and skype. Just a mere 60 years ago, it was the only way my grandparents kept in touch in the seven years in between meeting and getting married, when one lived in Beirut and the other in Cairo. Without these letters, I probably wouldn't even be here.

So what's better, in 2013, than getting a love letter, in an envelope, written with ink on a paper? I'll tell you --it's finding a letter that my mother wrote my sister 14 years ago, and realizing that it is timeless. The love of a mother, it seems, can overcome the fact that she passed away almost 13 years ago.

Today, my sister got a new tattoo: she took my mother's words from the letter, in my mother's handwriting, and had them tattooed on her arm. Now if that isn't love...

I translated the letter here because I thought it was beautiful. And because even though my mother didn't write this to me, I feel like she would've wrote me the same thing.


"To my darling daughter
I am your mom! And I always will be. Know that I love you more than anything in the world. And that I am always here for you, for better or for worse, and never, and I mean ever, be afraid to tell me how you feel and what you want. If there is a problem, we resolve it together, and if there is a happy situation then we will be happy together.
I love you and I wish you all the possible happiness in life. I am sure that with your smile and your kindness you will always get what you want...
Well! I hope you're going to fill this diary with happy thoughts and fun adventures...
I love you!

PS: I'm sure there are a lot of spelling mistakes, but I know you understand me..."

scaredy cat

I'm really not a cat person. And by that I mean that I hate cats. They scare the shit out of me. I don't know why, I can't explain it, but when I see a cat all I think is "run" and when I catch a cat's eyes I get shivers down my spine...

Now my Parisian lives alone in a big apartment on the ground floor of a building in the middle of Achrafieh, with a garden and a balcony that both connect to the streets. A few months ago, he saw pee and excrements on his father's bed --which has a door that opens into the garden, that he must've left open. This happened on more than one occasion. Cats were constantly roaming through his garden then, and he kept trying to scare them away.

Then one day in May, we heard miaowing coming from the garden. It was small, young sort of miaow.  The garden was pitch black and we could barely see a thing, but we kept following the sound until we found a newborn black kitten entangled in the bushes. My Parisian helped it out, trying not to touch it with bare hands so that his smell didn't rub off on it. Once freed, he put him down and we waited for the mother to collect it. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the mother appeared with two other kittens by her side, and they were reunited.

The next day, my Parisian went to Paris for a few days. When he came back, there was no sign of the three kittens or their mother. I was relieved, as I really didn't want cats constantly around me seeing how much they scare me. On a Sunday, as he spent the afternoon cleaning his garden, my Parisian saw something odd in the small fountain: there he found the three kittens, who had drowned.

The very same night, he heard a noise coming from his father's bedroom. He went in there to check, and there he found a female cat who had just given birth to three kittens. In the bedroom! The mother panicked as she saw him and fled the room. He carefully put the kittens on a pillow and placed them outside in the garden for her to collect them, and closed the connecting door.

One morning a few days later, we were walking to the kitchen when we smelt a horrible stench. We looked everywhere for what we were sure to be cat excrements, and finally, after about 10 minutes, hidden under a pillow, was a huge pile of shit on the couch. It was so disgusting I almost threw up. We cleaned up and closed the windows, as it seemed cats came in from everywhere.

Later that day, he heard a sound coming from the living room. And sure enough... there were the kittens! Two of them, not three. Behind a big trunk. Again, he carefully placed them outside, and barred all the doors, all the windows, once and for all.

Now the family of three took refuge in the garden. The two kittens never seemed to leave the garden and the mother come and goes. My Parisian, being a born animal lover, couldn't help but feed them, giving them a box of tuna every morning, and some milk.

This morning, at about 7am, we awoke at the sound of a kitten, miaowing and miaowing and miaowing. We ignored it and went back to sleep. Then, later, when my Parisian went outside to give them their morning tuna, he couldn't find them anywhere. Until he saw one of them completely flattened on its stomach, and the other with an odd foam coming out of his mouth, both looking dead. Or almost. He called the vet and they both concluded that they must have been poisoned, although they don't know how. He carried them in a cardboard box and drove them to the veterinarian, but both of them died.

Kind of disturbingly weird, isn't it?

flying solo

I have a fear of flying. It's something I can't control, I can't explain, and I can't get rid of. It wasn't always that way though. I used to fly all by myself ever since I was 7 years old. And I took 14 hour flights 4 times a year and I had no problemo.

But then one day, something happened: I got scared. It was a sudden realization of just how much life hangs by a thread and I'm not ready for that thread to break. I've seen death from many different angles and honestly, I don't want to experience any of it yet. There is so much to life that I haven't discovered, so much I still want to do, I definitely do not want to go down on a crashing plane. I know what everyone says: chances of dying in a car accident are like a million times higher, blablabla. But planes in specific scare me. When you're so many feet off the ground, completely and utterly without control on your own well-being with no way whatsoever to protect yourself, nothing makes me feel more vulnerable. Nothing, except of course life in general. Because even though I only get this sickening fear when I'm flying, the truth is, death is always beyond our control.

Now life, that's something we can choose, change, adapt and transform as we go.

I'm having breakfast in Rome this morning, and tonight, I will be dining in New York.

The last time I was in the city that never sleeps was 3 and half years ago, which seems like a lifetime away. I had packed up my bags and left behind 2 unforgettable years, a time when walking through Fifth Avenue, or Central Park, or near the Empire State building was just another walk I took everyday. Now I find myself filled with anguish, returning to this city I was so in love with as a different person. Maybe New York hasn't changed, but I certainly have. The last time I was there, I was 23 years-old. I was a journalist, fresh off Grad School, and the world was at my feet. I wanted to become the next Christiane Amanpour and use the Middle-East's fucked-up politics as my personal training ground. Then I made choices. Choices that you get to make even if they are sometimes dictated by things we can't control. I made it as a news anchor and head of my own news bulletin but I hated it and I quit my job and changed my career. Now I run an NGO, I write a blog, and in my free time I write and act for a TV/Web series. Basically I find myself nothing like the person I expected to be back then. And I know I'm at a crossroads once again, and that the choices I make in the coming few months may completely change the course of my life. Again. And that's okay. As long as I know I can control it, as long as these decisions are my own, then my life is my own.

I don't know what may happen in that flight I'm about to take (hopefully nothing because I'm just a paranoid freak with plane phobia) --it scares the shit out of me and I have to severely drug myself in order to survive it, but it is my choice to go. The way there might be scary as hell for me, but the destination it worth the risk.

I know they say "enjoy the journey, not the destination." I get it and it's true. I say it too sometimes. But not when I'm flying solo. 

there's no merit in loving if everything is easy

Some people say my family is cursed. They say we're "like the Keneddy's." That the series of tragedies never end. I guess I can see where they're coming from...  Two cancers, a rare illness called "Harada", a spinal cord injury, a heart attack, five deaths. And every time, we think that's it, this has got to be the last one, we can't possibly deal with any more. But apparently we can.

And so it has crossed my mind at some point too, that our family is indeed, peculiarly unlucky. Actually we were laughing about that on Friday night, the day my aunt buried her husband, and my cousins buried their father. 22 years before, on the very same day, my aunt walked down the aisle in a church in Paris and married the love of her life. This week, in stead of celebrating a love that was still very much alive, she wore a black dress and walked behind his casket in a cemetery.

That night, as we were gathered around her fireplace,surrounded by the pictures of all those we've lost, we all laughed. It might seem odd to still be laughing, on a day where you just buried someone you adored, but there is something about our family that goes beyond the pain we feel again and again. The entire time of the condoleances, my cousin was wearing a little paper boat clipped on her dress. "This one day, my father was crying," she said. "I didn't know what to do or how to stop his pain, so I clipped on this little paper boat on his shirt, and it made him laugh." We need the silly little things to make us smile, even in the worst of times.



What people don't know about our family is that we're actually one of the luckiest. The love that bonds us all so closely together only grows every time another tragedy hits. No one is left alone, not for a second. The other day, I was looking at my father's and my uncle's girlfriends, and I told them "What are you still doing here?" And my aunt joked: "Run! Run for your life!" Run for your life quite literately. But deep down we all know why they haven't run yet.




There is no merit in loving someone when everything is easy. When they are always perfect, and healthy, and kind, and full of qualities. Anyone can love if that's that. But when you go through the flaws, and the years and the pain, when you've seen the ugly, the poor, the sick... that's when you know you love someone all the way. My aunt said even if she knew she would lose her husband 22 years after she got married, she wouldn't have missed a minute of it, she wouldn't have exchanged him for anything. My father said the same thing about my mother. Even I look back and say that although the days when my ex-boyfriend was sick were the hardest, they were the days I loved him the most, and I can still admit that now.


This post is a tribute to Joe.

It's hard to put words together and do him justice, it's hard to write anything at all because none of us want to accept that he's gone. But there's no merit in loving someone if everything is easy.

dear mom,

I remember looking forward to this day. A few days after you were gone, I thought to myself, I can’t wait for it to be ten years from now, because it wont hurt as much anymore. And in some ways, it doesn't. It’s hard to admit, but we do get used to everything in the end, even not having the people we love most in the world around us. But I think about you every single day.

It was ten years ago, the last time I saw you. I’m not sure I remember your voice anymore, I don’t think I remember your smell. And I know it doesn’t really matter, but the thing is, it does. When I watch a video of you and you say something, I find myself surprised, not recognizing your voice.

I’m sending you this letter out in the open, over the airwaves, through a blog. It would’ve been really funny trying to explain to you what a blog is, just like I spent two days teaching you how to send an email. It’s not because I want to share this personal moment with the world. It’s because I want the world to know who you were. Who you are still. I didn’t understand it back then, I couldn’t understand what you were going through. I was so young even though I thought I was so grown up and already knew the world… I knew nothing, and I was selfish, because even when you were the one who was dying from three tumors growing relentlessly in your head, in your lungs, in your liver, I still thought about my own suffering more than I thought about yours. I couldn’t understand how scared you must’ve been, to know you were dying. How alone you must’ve felt. How terrifying it must be to know you will not see your children grow up. That your son who was only seven, might not remember you.

I once asked you if you were scared. You said “I’m scared for you.” Because that's who you are. And I still learn from it, every day.

You’re the kind of wife, who when doctors told had a life threatening disease, your first instinct was to turn to your husband and ask if he was okay. You’re the kind of mother who asked me if you could remove your wig, because it was itching you, but you wanted to make sure it didn’t bother me to see you without hair. You’re the kind of woman who consciously opted for no chemo, so that instead of living an extra few months but being sick all the time, you would live a little less, but be able to enjoy it with us. The kind of mother who has the courage to put her children around a table and tell them that she may not always be physically present, but that she would always, always be around us, no matter what.

And the truth is, even though my faith has gone up and down and sideways in the last few years, that I barely believe there is anything out there, that I am as skeptical as they get, I have no doubt that you are around me somehow. Your words, they resonate in my mind as if it was just yesterday that you said them to me. Everything you taught me, I use in ways I could have never imagined. And I try my best to pass them on to Soraya and Karim, because they weren’t as lucky as me, they didn’t have as much time. But even though they had you for so little, you left your mark on them too. I look at Karim and I see you in his eyes. I look at Soraya and I see you in her smile. Your three children have your name tattooed on their bodies --because we take you everywhere we go.

There are days where not having you here is torturous. Yes, it’s true, I miss you like hell when it’s Christmas morning and you’re not there. You were the only person I thought about the day I graduated from Columbia. And it kills me to know that you will not be there the day we get married, or the day we become parents. But I would give up all these days, gladly, if I could have you on all the other days. The days when I’m sick and I feel like crap and I want you to be there so you can hold me and nurse be back to health. The days I’m in total quarter-life crisis mode, and I am dying to talk to you about it. The days I screw up. The days I’m scared. The days I fall in love and the days I get my heart broken. The days I look at Soraya and Karim and I don’t know how give them enough love from you and me. And mostly, the days I’m happy, and all I wish is for you to be part of that happiness.

But I haven't shared any of that with you in ten years. The last time I saw you, in that moment, in that hospital bed, I thought you were already gone. I looked at you in so much pain, and all I wanted was for you to be at peace. I held your hand, I told you I loved you, but I truly thought I was saying it more for me than for you. I thought you couldn't hear me, but I was wrong. Even at your worst suffering, in your dying moment, you found a way to come back to the surface, and to give me one more proof of unwavering love. I will never forget how you suddenly came back to your body and reached out for me, consciously grabbed my hand, even though you had not an ounce of energy left in you, you put it on your heart and I could feel every beat. I’m still alive, is what you trying to tell me. I love you too. Even though you couldn’t say it, you found a way to make sure I knew. The love you gave me was so big, so strong, it has kept me going for the last ten years. Even in your death, you know how to make me feel better. Because that’s who you are.

And yes, I want the whole world to know how proud I am to be your daughter. That I have a mother, who despite the distance between heaven and earth, still manages to help me through the day. I’m so grateful for you, and all I can hope for is that wherever you are, I can make you proud. But I miss you so much and no matter how many words I write today, I’ll never be able to convey it.

I love you.

that little angel

I know a little angel whose birthday it is today. When you turn 13 years old, you're expected to be going from boy to teenager. Your voice is expected to start changing. Your facial hair is supposed to start growing. You're not expected to be dead.

But if I've learned anything so far in life, it's that nothing is ever as expected.

That little angel is my cousin, Philippe. He was born on May 26th, 1998, when I was 13 years old, and even then, he already looked like an angel. The type of cherub whose blondish hair say one thing and mischievous eyes say another. And those eyes, they were open to the world. Very young, he could see through anyone, and ask the right questions. I remember when he was four years old, and he saw me sad one day, and he asked me if it was because I missed my mother. A four year old boy could see my sadness better than anyone else around me. That's the type of boy he was.

You'd think a boy at 10 or 11 would be shy around girls. But not Philippe. He had them lined up, girls of all ages, and had flirtatious lines for anyone and everyone. "You've become so beautiful I didn't even recognize you!" he once said to a fifty year old friend of the family. She smiled and giggled and he had her under his spell in half a second. And he had that magical power with everyone.

He died on July 31st 2009, in a tragic, horrendous accident, that had the entire country talking. But I wont tell that story, because he shouldn't be remembered for the way he died. He should be remembered for the way he lived.

And what I learned from his life, is that sometimes eleven years can be more meaningful than a hundred. And even in his death, his presence is felt every day. I know this because I see his family, his mother, his father, his two older sisters, who are able to talk about him and smile. Who have the strength, despite what they've been through, to turn the tragic into a positive power, to take Philippe's memory and make it enduring, everlasting and immortal.

What I learned is that life is fragile. That in a split second, you're here and then you're not. The only thing you can do about it is decide how the memory of you will go on.

busy world

The world is busy.
Bin Laden is dead. Will and Kate got married. Gaddafi's son is killed. Scarlett Johanson is dating Sean Penn. I can't keep up.
What's funny is that even though "Bin Laden Dead" is all over the place, the "Royal Kiss" is just as big, even though it's three days old. I guess it's because love and death are the two things life revolves around.
I mention this because I walk up this morning to a flood of world news, and the only I have to do today was write a blog post. I'm a journalist --or I was a journalist before I decided daily news was too depressing and I developed plane phobia from reporting on so many crashes. But here I am, writing a blog, funnily enough, about love and death. And there is nothing more obscure.
I mean, what the hell do I (or anyone else for that matter) really know about how love works, lasts, breaks, hurts? Yeah so we love, and then we don't; we each have our stories and sometimes it feels like we go through the same thing, but the truth is, every story is its own.
And yes, I've lost quite a few people I love to the "other side" but it hardly makes me an expert. Last year I went through a "I'm afraid of death" phase and I bought about thirteen books on the subject. One's the story about a four year old boy who remembers a previous life (creepy) and another is written by this man who supposedly sees and talks to ghosts (even creepier). I thought it would help if I could get some proof that there is something going on after we go through the (inevitable) expiry date of our bodies. But it confused me even more.
And the truth is, despite everything that happens, the world keeps going. Today Bin Laden is dead and the prince has a fairytale wedding.Tomorrow the headlines will change but the heart of it will be the same. Love and death keeps the world busy. Keeps us all busy. Even though we know nothing about it.

the shadows of loss

There's been a lot of loss these past few weeks. A friend from high-school who succumbed to a ravaging cancer after a year of courageous fighting. A friend who lost her father. Another who lost his mother. Makes me pause and think about what remains.

The first person I know who died, was my grandmother. I was nine years-old, and she was my favorite person in the world. I remember how she hid chocolates under her pillow, and I would sneak in and steal them. I remember her hoarse voice, her hugs, her pineapple cake. I remember sleeping next to her and feeling safe. And I remember how she loved me.

The thing about loss, is that it tells you what's real. When someone physically disappears from your life, your realize what this person really was through the memories he leaves behind. When my mother died, my brother was 7 years-old. He doesn't remember what job she had, how she dressed, or how she wore her hair. But he does remember that she used to take him fishing on the Manara, with makeshift fishing-rod she put together with string, a wooden stick, and a borrowed hook. My sister lost her best-friend when she was 17, and when she thinks about her, she talks about her adventurous spirit and their late nights of confidences. Not what grades she had in school or she wanted to study at university. My 11-year-old cousin died, less than two years ago, and everyone remembers his smile. His sisters remember his mischievous eyes, his friends remember the pranks he played. His father remembers his generous spirit, his mother remembers the feeling of holding him tight against her.

Everything that is important, remains. The courage of those who fought, the smiles, the kisses, the I-love-yous; the moments only you two shared, like laughing your head off because of an empty toothpaste --something no one else will ever understand, but that still makes you feel like you share a joke, from across heaven and earth.

We spend so much time on things that will never matter. We get upset about materialistic objects that in the big scheme of things have absolutely no value. And sometimes we neglect the only things we will be able to take with us --or leave behind. The things that, in the end, make us who we are. Maybe the best way to learn how to live life, is to learn from those who already lived.

the tumors of life

I wanted to write a love story today. Something that would make everyone smile for the new work week ahead. But I woke up this morning in sweats, after having spent the night having nightmarish dreams about having a tumor. The one word that sends shivers down my spine and makes me want to puke whenever I hear it. My second most hated word in any language, after cancer.

I remember the first time I heard it. I was nine years old and I heard the adults talking about it. I remember asking "can anyone catch it?" and they said yes, anyone could catch it and no one knew what it was from. I was scared shitless. So scared, in fact, that the word cancer stayed buried back in my mind for the next few years. Little did I know that this word would come to define the first quarter of my life. When I was 13, I wrote a book called "I Believe in Angels." It was about a sixteen year-old boy, dying from Cancer. It may seem odd for a 13-year-old girl to write a story with such drama --which at the time, I knew nothing about. I could only imagine what it was like for the boy to find out he was dying, for his friend to deal with the news while still being there to make him smile, and for his family to accept this tragedy. It was all made up in my mind, all my imagination.

I had no idea that three years later I would come to experience this word so close it would feel like a gun to my temple. When my mother got sick, at first, no one mentioned the scariest-word-in-the-world. It was "a mass" that she had to remove from her brain, and a "treatment" that would make her loose her hair. And then one day, I sat across from a therapist who asked me questions about my mother's illness, until she made me say the word. Worst moment of my life.

From then on, it was like living with a ticking-clock inside my stomach. I was afraid to find myself alone with my father because I was worried of what bad news he could tell me. I was too scared to look anyone in the eyes, because I didn't want to see the worry on their face. I was terrified of speaking to my mother, because I was too scared I would break-down and burst-out crying, when everyone specifically said no crying and no negative energy around her. It was exhausting.

When she died, we thought we buried Cancer with her. Never wanted to hear that word again. Ever. But then two years later we buried my grandmother with the same word. And I thought that must be it. And then, some odd years later, I fell in love and was happy and the word came back in my life. Again.

When my boyfriend looked at me and told me he had a tumor in his chest, with tears in his eyes, I became a rock. I couldn't even blink. I held my breath, afraid of what would happen if I lost control. This time, I wasn't going to burry anyone but that fucking word.

I was older now and it was different. No one was trying to protect me from the realities anymore, I had to protect him. I came to realize, very quickly, that this wasn't happening to me again, but rather, this was happening to him. And so he fought, and I fought with him, and I was happy that for once, Cancer was the one getting its butt kicked. And he did it. And last year like now, like this very week, we buried Cancer, on its own, hopefully for good. It wore us out, changed us forever, made us take different paths then we expected. But this morning when I woke up, all I could see was his face, that first day in the hospital, when they were wheeling him down to the biopsy. And all I could see was my mother, who put on a brave face, smiling at her three children, pretending that word hadn't just shook her whole world around. And all I could see was my grandmother, once the symbol of beauty and elegance, weak and ravaged by this savage disease.

But people fight this everyday, I've seen it. And I just wanted to write a tribute, to those who fought, those who lost, and those who will join the fight.

till death do us part

Today would've been my parents' 27th wedding anniversary.
And I would like to honor that by writing about them in today's post. It makes sense: I write about relationships, and to me, they had the best kind of romantic relationship you could wish to have. It's true, I will never know if they would have stayed together had my mother not passed away, but it doesn't matter because it didn't happen.
So here's their story.
27 years ago like today, my parents stood in front of a mayor in Cyprus, and exchanged vows. They had a civil wedding because she was Sunni and he was Catholic, and Lebanon didn't allow that in 1984. It still doesn't.
It took a while before they got to exchange those vows. The first time my father saw my mother, he was 17, she was 18. He spotted her in front of a school, looked at her and thought: "this woman will be my wife." That's what he says anyway --but it's so cosmically romantic that I want to believe him. They only met several years later, through a friend in common, and started dating. They dated for 7 years before they got married. It was during the Lebanese civil war, Christians and Muslims were killing each other, and they were in love. You can imagine how my grandparents felt about their relationship. And so they left each other a few times, trying to comply with society's wishes... but they always got back. I once found a letter from my father to my mother, written during one of those times. He wrote "If you're not in my life, my life will never be complete. You are the one. There is nothing else I want."
It may seem futile --anyone can write these words. But do they? Writing a letter is already romantic enough. I barely ever got a greeting card from my ex --you know, the ones that already say everything for you, and you just sign underneath. Very personal indeed.
But the truth is, although beginnings are very important, the real test of love, I think, is what happens with time. A lot of couples start out madly in love, can't-live-without-each-other passion and whatnot. But they don't all stand the test of time. To me, the greatest proof of love are my parents. Not everyone can say that --in fact, many people around me would say the exact opposite. Our generation's phobia of commitment obviously comes from their parents' examples. And my hope for love obviously comes from mine.
10 years ago like today, my parents celebrated their last anniversary together. My mom had a brain tumor, lung cancer, and liver cancer; she had three months left to live; but she wanted to celebrate. She knew it would be the last time. She made me her accomplice. She rented a hotel room which we decorated with rose petals and balloons. She took my father for dinner at the hotel, and had the waiter bring the room key in stead of the check. My father blushed as if he was 18 years old. And it was just like when they were.

You know it's love when a man still wears his wedding ring ten years after his wife died --and wears hers on a chain around his neck. You know it's love when even "till death do us part," doesn't.