In the midst of suffering, happiness still shines

(Baonghean.vn) - When we arrived home, he was washing his wife's hair. The husband dried each strand of his wife's hair. They laughed and talked to each other. None of us said anything because we wanted to forever admire that moment called happiness.

Love overcomes rapids

In the chilly wind of the first cold season, I followed the footsteps of the Faith group's volunteer group to visit the family of Ms. Nguyen Thi Phuong in Gia De hamlet, Nghia Dung commune, Tan Ky district. Located about 2 km from the legendary Ho Chi Minh road, the small house where the woman suffered countless pains due to illness, but is also a famous house because it witnessed the existence of a fairy tale in everyday life, about the power of love that has overcome countless barriers, challenges, and is still challenging death every day and every hour.

Born in 1979, in 1996, Ms. Phuong learned that she had a spinal cord tumor. Working as a worker in Song Than Industrial Park, Binh Duong Province to earn a living and pay for treatment, one time while in the hospital, she met Mr. Truong Van Chin, a young soldier from Tien Giang. They got to know each other and fell in love, but as her illness got worse, she returned to her hometown for treatment and wrote a letter asking to break up so that Mr. Chin could have a happy future.

Ms. Phuong said, I - a girl who was paralyzed by illness and had to lie still, after writing a farewell letter, was devastated by pain. After 4 months of writing that letter, one day I looked out at my small yard and saw the person I loved traveling thousands of kilometers to come to me in the middle of nowhere. Then the whole Gia De neighborhood was also in an uproar because a young man with a southern accent asked for directions to "find a friend's house", and then stayed to take care of his friend. Who would have thought that Mr. Chin would overcome all the criticism and discrimination to be faithful to his first love in the midst of adversity in both space and circumstances.

The wedding of a white, agile, good-looking young man from the South with a paralyzed girl from the midlands of Nghe An. On the wedding day, the groom was assigned by the bride's family to let the bride sit in a wheelchair. It was truly a strange story, a fairy tale in real life.

Even more miraculously, after many surgeries, at one point Ms. Phuong weighed only under 30kg, yet she was still able to become a mother and successfully gave birth to the baby, much to the amazement of even the doctors. Now Truong Bao Phuc is 9 years old, in grade 4, healthy and rides his bike to school at the village school like many of his peers.

Despite being paralyzed, Ms. Phuong still gave birth successfully without surgery. In the photo is the family when Truong Bao Phuc was less than 1 year old. Photo courtesy of Ms. Phuong.

Mr. Chin said that in 2016, Ms. Phuong suffered from severe pleural effusion. The Provincial General Hospital and the team of doctors from Cho Ray Hospital were “helpless”, and the ambulance took her home with all hope almost gone. At that time, each of her breaths depended entirely on an oxygen tank.

After a few days at home, the fluid from her lungs through the drainage tube gradually decreased, her breathing became stronger, once again, from the "near-death" realm, in her happy home, her husband and children took her back from the hands of death.

During that illness, Mr. Chin had to take a year and a half off work to take care of his wife. Now he has returned to work for 6 months in Bac Vinh Industrial Park. Although bedridden, Ms. Phuong still asked her family to buy her a counter to sell groceries to the local people. She also took on typing and printing services. The villagers who needed her work would bring her to work. "I am still happy because I am still useful, still saving every penny to help Mr. Chin raise Bao Phuc to study" - Ms. Phuong confided.

Poet - "Messenger of happiness"!

When guests came to visit, Ms. Phuong kept telling stories to make everyone happy. On the small bed, she lay in the middle and around her were a lot of medicine, medical equipment... also around her were poetry books, photos of meetings. On her side was a catheter, but on her chest was a laptop containing many poems and stories she wrote herself. And with that same computer, the woman who had been immobile for decades now connected with the bustling life outside, but not with the gloomy inner self of a person constantly sick and in pain, but with the strong mind of a woman who had defeated death many times.

It is known that, from the special feelings that her husband has for her, Ms. Phuong always feels that she is a happy person and cannot express them all in words. Therefore, she writes stories to express her feelings. The autobiography she wrote was "sponsored" by the People's Police Newspaper Publishing House and is called "Love Fairy Tale". When the pain was persistent and she could not write long, she turned to poetry.

She lay there with a withered body, her feet shriveled and bleeding black, but her voice was still warm and full of inner strength. She compared herself to a “Crescent Moon”, but it was a “Crescent Moon” that was always optimistic because “Her smile still bloomed, her soft lips still fresh”. She read to us the songs Crescent Moon, Debt to You… The verses were full of emotion: “A crescent moon in the middle of a sea of ​​people/Who laughs, who cries, who feels empty-hearted/Sadness cannot be counted or measured/Just need to be beside loving arms”...

Ms. Dinh Thi Thao - President of the Women's Union of Nghia Dung commune said that people in Nghia Dung also call Ms. Phuong a poet, because she has many poems about love, fate, and the concept of happiness, which are very close and touching. Not only women in Nghia Dung but also women in many places hand-copy them to pass on to each other, especially on Vietnamese Women's Day October 20 and International Women's Day March 8. Ms. Phuong's example, along with her poems, has given strength to many women, contributing to lighting up and warming the fire of happiness in many other families.

During this time, Ms. Phuong used Facebook with the account name "Phuong Chin", and regularly, she introduced poems full of sound, light, and the excitement of a soul longing to be in harmony with life. Reading the sparkling, pure, and clear poems, few people knew that they were the poems of a woman whose body had been in the operating room no less than 5 times, and had returned from the brink of death many times:

"I sit and whet the pig's thread
Join wings to fly in life
In tune with the rhythm of life
The soul wanders with the scene of playing and having fun

Cool autumn breeze
Quietly watching the flowers and leaves sway on the branches
Watching the clear blue lake
The sun shines a shimmering golden light

Nature harmonizes
Butterflies, bees... dance and sing in the sunlight
Flocks of people fly around
"Flourishing wings is so cute"

(Nature in Concert, September 28, 2017)

Together with the Faith group, we gave her a small gift with wishes for health and happiness on the occasion of the founding day of the Vietnam Women's Union. We said goodbye to her when the afternoon had fallen, in the cold late autumn of the mountainous region, with strong winds whipping into the valley, we felt strangely warm. Each of us brought back "special energies", special lessons about love and happiness, from a special woman: Endless suffering but not unhappiness, crushed by illness but shining with faith and aspiration.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Phuong and Mr. Truong Van Chin deserve to be messengers of love, beautiful symbols of the immortality of love!

Receiving a gift of 10 million VND from the representative of the Faith group, Ms. Nguyen Thi Phuong affirmed that she will always live a worthy life to be an example of perseverance and love for life to be worthy of everyone's attention. She also sent her wishes for the Faith group to continue to carry out many charitable journeys to multiply faith in life as the group's motto: Sow faith - Nurture hope - Reap love. Photo: OPND.

The Faith Volunteer Group took a souvenir photo with the family of Ms. Nguyen Thi Phuong - "messenger of love" in the "happy house" in Gia De hamlet, Nghia Dung commune, Tan Ky district. Photo: OPND

Duc Duong