I am spending my holiday with family in Germany. My father is retired and my mother is semi-retired as she only does a few hours a week, helping out a lady who cares for her severely disabled partner. I enjoy my parents’ company and therefore I readily join them around the television to watch the offerings on German television.

The programming seems to be specifically designed for retirees, with long-running German telenovelas, and dubbed American series from the 1980s and older. I usually get into the telenovelas quickly, occasionally asking about the fate of some characters that have disappeared since I last watched. And I always manage to catch episodes I have seen before when I watch old  American series such as The Twilight Zone. As for the repeated movies, my father said jokingly “We only watch the movies we know” and so it happened that I caught a glimpse of one of my favourite movies “Die Brücken am Fluß” which is the German title for Bridges of Madison County. I was not in the mood to weep so I did not watch it in its entirety. Unlike my father I am not a fan of watching a movie I have seen before, least of all the ones that open up the wounds in my heart.

My mother talked me, however, into watching the movie Love is All You Need. I watch very little television, and I probably see less than half a dozen movies per year. I acquiesced this time because my mom praised this film so much and said she had seen it twice already, once as recently as last week. Also, the male lead was played by Pierce Brosnan, a handsome actor I had a crush on back in the 1980s when he played the mysterious detective Remington Steele, and I followed almost every season of that series. And while Remington Steele appealed to the romantic minded teenager I was in the late 1980s, the older Brosnan, is definitely more attractive to the middle aged woman I turned into now, and the character he played even more so.

The movie is simply a love story in the stunning setting of an Italian villa surrounded by lemon orchards, beautiful blue skies, and clear turquoise waters. The female main character Ida is a Danish hairdresser who has just finished a course of chemotherapy and has lost her hair to the cancer treatment. To add to her woes, she walks in on her husband having sex with a younger co-worker. The couple were supposed to attend their daughter’s wedding in Italy, and Ida decides to travel there alone. She runs into different problems on her way there, and is further humiliated when her husband shows up with the young airhead he is having an affair with.

The wedding location is a villa that belongs to Philip, the father of the groom, who also owns the lemon orchards surrounding it. He is a widower with a sour disposition, and he has several run-ins with Ida, who is brilliantly portrayed by a Danish actress Trine Dyrholm. I have never seen her before, but she was utterly convincing as this optimistic, and gentle soul, whose indomitable spirit shines despite her suffering and perhaps as a result of it. Philip finds out about her illness and has seen the bald head she hid under her blonde wig, but he is attracted to her optimism and thirst for life. This was my undoing in this love story. A man who is attracted to the woman’s soul rather than her body. A man who reassures her that no matter what her prognosis is, whether they will be together for ten minutes, a few month or many years, what is truly important is that he has the pleasure of her company for the time they are both given.

I have felt like this, so I know. I was married for almost nine years, and I remember very little from the decade I lived beside my ex husband since we first met in 1998. The years of my marriage seem like a vast empty space punctuated by decisions on home locations, careers, business, and finances. Except for a few words uttered in anger, there is almost no trace of left of the intensity of feeling we shared, if we ever did. I was living in an emotional wasteland. By contrast, if I added up all the moments I spent with my beloved, and included even the occasions we exchanged texts, the temporal will add up to a few days. The physical will amount to me kissing him on the cheek, and him kissing me on the forehead. We joined hands a couple of times, and I think I put my lips or cheek to the surprisingly soft skin of his palm. Yet the emotional intensity of these few encounters was, to me at least, worth years of methodical and loveless spousal couplings. I remember nuances of speech, and whole conversations exchanged without words. I have lived a lifetime of feelings, in a few texts, in mundane details exchanged. When he once lent me his jumper I felt it as an embrace, and when our eyes met and held, I felt him holding my very soul.

Life is not about how many breaths you take, or how many years you live,  it is about the moments that take your breath away. I now treasure those moments, whether lived, felt or remembered. Some love stories capture such moments, and those are the ones that get to me. The movie ended with that love declaration. I am sure that everyone who has ever loved understands it. Whether for a moment, a month or a few years, true love deserves to be treasured. I wept at the end of that movie too.