Which one is correct and proper? Is it “I will love you till I die” or “I will love you till you die”?
If you say “… till I die”, it’s a no-brainer. You die, no more love. And to say “… till you die” means your love ends when your beloved passes away. The problem is there is no on-off switch for love.
I first chanced upon this little brain-twister sometime in 1964 when I was in Primary 4. As I related in my article last week, I was asked from time to time by some illiterate people to write letters after word got around in my village that I was able to take dictation quite well.
Well, two young men asked me to write letters to their sweethearts. The first one told me to end his letter with the sentence, “I will love you till I die”. I kid you not; it was exactly that, word for word, and all in English! He was illiterate but he claimed to know the meaning.
About a week or so later, the other one wanted me to put down, “I will love you till you die”, also in English.
Silly little me; I should have kept my mouth shut but instead, I protested that it should not be “… till you die”.
“What do you know?” he retorted. “You’re just a little kid.”
“It’s not me who said it! Last week I wrote ‘… till I die’ for your friend.”
I was exaggerating. The other guy was not his friend.
“Whom are you talking about?” he asked.
“Who else? John, lah!”
“Oh, that idiot! I should have known. What was he up to?”
I had touched a raw nerve somewhere. According to my elder sister, they were rivals. I used the word “friend” to see his reaction. As I expected, he was a bit miffed.
“I wrote his letter last week. At the end of it he said, ‘I will love you till I die’,” I told him.
“What else did he say?”
“I never talk about other people’s letters.”
“But you just told me that he said, ‘… till I die’!”
At that very moment, my mother entered the house. In her arms was a bundle of leafy vegetables and some beans. Addressing neither of us in particular she asked what we were arguing about. After the young man finished his explanation, she scolded him for having argued with a child.
With a sheepish look on his face, he asked, “I still want to know which one is correct; mine or the other one?”
“It’s up to you,” said my mother as she put her vegetables down on the floor. “What exactly do you want to say? It must come from your heart, and you must mean it.”
“Of course, but I don’t fully see the difference between the two,” he said.
“What did you tell him?” my mother turned to me.
“Don’t ask me! He called me a child,” I said.
As I said last week, I did not have the maturity to know about love between men and women. I was, to borrow today’s parlance, quite like a robot — a robotic letter-writer. What I was told, I wrote.
My mother was quiet for a while as she sorted out her vegetables in a rattan tray. Sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite her, the young man waited; a lighted cigarette between his fingers.
“Let’s see … ‘… till I die’,” she said, deliberately trying to say the English words slowly one by one while complaining that they were so hard to pronounce. “Isn’t it part of a song on the radio? I don’t know a lot of English, but I remember that much.”
The song she meant was, ‘I Love You Till I Die’ sung by a not-so-famous singer, Anthony Ebrada. I think the composer was Louis Levant, a Filipino.
“When you say ‘… till I die’, I think it means you love someone all your life until your last breath. It’s not possible to love after that because you’re already dead,” said my mother.
“I agree,” said the young man. “But can the spirit of the dead keep on loving?”
“That doesn’t count,” said my mother firmly. “We are dealing with the living only. In any case, even if the spirit can love, the living won’t know it.”
“So, what about ‘… till you die’,” I asked, my curiosity at its peak.
“When you say that,” said my mother, pointing at the young man to keep his attention, “you mean that your love for someone ends when that person dies.”
“That’s what I want in my letter, but Harry didn’t like it,” he said.
“He disagreed because it was not the same as what he wrote the other day. He doesn’t know its full meaning,” she said.
“So, would it be okay if I said that to my girlfriend?”
“Yes, you can, but should you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a big boy; old enough to get married. You can say whatever you want. But what if your wife dies and you can’t stop loving her?”
The young man’s face turned pale. It was obvious that he never thought about it that way. With his cheeks twitching, he sat silently for several moments.
Meanwhile, my mother continued to sort her vegetables and I doodled on the back cover of my exercise book until my pencil became blunt and had to be re-sharpened.
We did finish the young man’s letter that day, and at the end of it, he made sure that I wrote down, “I will love you till I die”. I imagined that it made his sweetheart’s day when she received it.
As for John’s girl — I think John nicknamed her Ayang (short for Sayang) — she came to have her letter read. As I was the writer, I had no problem reading it aloud to her. Each line made her happy, but after the last line, she looked puzzled for a moment and asked me to translate the “… till I die” part. She never went to school and did not know English.
Fortunately, my mother was close by, in another part of the house softly singing lullabies to put my little sister to sleep. We both deferred to her and she repeated what she said to John’s rival the other day. To our surprise, Ayang was not too happy about the explanation.
“Why?” my mother asked her.
“I don’t like the ‘… till I die’ bit,” she said.
“You want him to love you forever?”
“No! I don’t mean that. It’s not possible.”
“Then what do you want, or don’t want?”
“I don’t want him to die!
“We all get old and die.”
“What if he dies young?”
“You’re being silly, girl! Why do you torture yourself so?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like it when people talk about death.”
“Then tell John not to say, “I will love you till I die’! He should come up with something better in Bidayuh … much easier to read and understand.”
Naturally, the meeting ended with me writing another letter in which Ayang gave a long and winding explanation of why she did not want John to use the word “die” or “death” or any other related words.
I don’t remember that part of the letter because part way through it my young brain hurt so much that I just wanted the dictation to end as soon as possible so that I could go and play football with my friends.
As far as I was concerned, that day saw the death of “I will love you till I die”. Years later, when I finally appreciated why God made girls, memories of that day would pop up now and then, and I would say to myself, “If God were to turn back the pages of time for me, I too would not say that line to my loved one.”
To this day, I still think it’s a bit cringey and too dramatic. I much prefer the way Diana Lynn, an American actress (1939-1971), said it.
I will love you with all my heart,
To have forever – never to part.
This is a promise engrained in me,
Take my hand and let it be.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
