Our love is like surgery – it isn’t always tidy and it isn’t always easy Elly’s story
I OFTEN have to remind myself what an adjustment married life and fatherhood must be for David, someone who has lived so much of his life on the razor’s edge and in a fair degree of emotional isolation.
Our beginning was sometimes painful. Love, like surgery, isn’t always tidy, and it isn’t always easy. Rushing in and out of war zones is, in some ways, easier than the day-in, day-out normality of home life. You won’t always be the hero and saviour – there will be routine, boredom and difficult conversations.
I am grateful to him for showing true bravery and telling me things about his life that he had not shared with anyone before. They helped me to understand.
To see the best of David is to observe him with two very different groups of people. The first are the Syrian doctors he loves like brothers; the second are his daughters. Throughout 2016, as the situation in Aleppo spiralled ever downwards, David was consumed by an all-encompassing desire to end the devastation being wrought on the doctors and civilians of that city. His phone burned with images of what Russian and Syrian bombs and bullets were doing to soft little bodies.
There were dark nights of the soul, hours spent hunched over a laptop and tapping into a mobile phone. It was difficult to engage him on any subject other than Syria.
One of my greatest joys now is seeing David contend with the two tiny people who assail him as he arrives through our front door. He is a warm, gentle and devoted father.
I sometimes listen through the door as he reads Molly her bedtime story. When Elizabeth was ill, he stayed up with her through the night, holding her in his arms because it made her feel safe and secure, even though it meant he had no sleep himself. David embodies the truly heroic, if we will allow our heroes the vulnerability and humanity that make them real people.
A wise priest at the Catholic church where I was baptised and confirmed once said: ‘Go for the best and be prepared to work for it.’ It has always stuck with me. I wouldn’t want our daughters to miss real love in search of a romantic mirage; I am glad I didn’t either.
A hero all the more worthy of love because of his vulnerabilities. My extraordinary, complicated, beloved David.