For Mom: Love Story

note: This blog is for my mother, who brought me into the world, raised me, and is currently paying for my education. The least I could do was write a blog at her request.

"Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Before it was a widely-used phrase, it was just a sentence, written by a man, in a book.

Erich Segal, author of the best-selling novel turned hit film, Love Story, died Sunday of a heart attack.

Love Story, for anyone who has not read or seen it, is mother of all tear jerkers. Two young lovers get married despite a family's resistance, and then one of them falls ill and passes away much sooner than expected. Every time I watch Titanic, I think that perhaps the ship won't sink this time. Every time I watch this, I hope that she'll survive. (Both always end the same way.)

Segal's daughter spoke at his funeral, "That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last 30 years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was -- a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know."

So if you can take anything from that movie, or from the author's life, take the simple message that none of us know if we're going to have 23 years or 72; either way, do your work and love your family with fierce passion, and have the tenacity to do so all your days.