Here’s an unusual story on the power of love. It starts with a man who’d forgotten the love of his life.
Not only that — he’d forgotten his own name, who he is, and where he’s from. His fiancé, Penny, saw him on the national TV news and came to claim him, so to speak. Even though this was the first time he’d forgotten her, she knew this could happen.
Much earlier, when their dating evolved into a serious relationship, Jeff — that’s his name, Jeff Ingram — warned Penny that he suffers from “a rare psychiatric disorder called dissociative fugue. It’s a type of amnesia in which a person forgets everything about who they are and can also travel very far from home.”
It happened to him in the past, and he had to re-learn everything about his life: who he is, who his parents and other family members are, and pretty much everything else. With each episode of his disorder, his memory gets wiped clean. Penny went with Jeff through the painstaking task of rebuilding his life, piece by piece and memory by memory.
For the full story of Jeff and Penny, listen to the podcast episode “My Penny” on This Is Love podcast.
When I heard this story, I tried to imagine not what Jeff went through, but rather what Penny did. Imagine the saintly patience and colossal love with which she guided him back to her (and his) life. As he himself said, he gets to fall in love with her all over again, but she needed to be steadfast in her love and wait until he learned to be the guy she fell in love with. All the while loving him for who he is, not who he was. Imagine the superhuman strength of her conviction and emotion!
Would you be able to do that for someone you love? To help them become who they were the first time you met? And to do it over and over again, when necessary? I wish I could say without hesitation “yes” to those questions, but the deep-down-honest truth is — I am not sure I have this much strength! All I can hope for is that I’ll never need to find out.
Maybe Penny and Jeff’s love story can inspire you to reach deeper when times with your love get challenging.
I’m leaving you with the song that played in my head as I listened to their story: