Maswood Alam Khan : Before you fall in a huge disaster you do not realize how badly you need care and love. Before you are in a crisis you never know how deeply your partner cares for you.
Not before something bad happens in your life will you ever know how honestly your spouse or fiancé or fiancée loves you. So, if you want to make a litmus test of true love, wait till something very terrible happens. If your partner stays :with you in that phase, that is love, otherwise it was only empty talk of love.

Rojas wrote Jessica: "When I get out, let's buy the dress and we'll get married" Esteban Rojas had to wait pretty long before he realized that he badly needed love from his sweetheart Jessica Ganiez and that he had to fulfill his promise of buying her the wedding dress for a big church wedding even after they have already been together for 25 years, raised their children and are now grandparents.
Yet although Rojas and Jessica were legally hitched in a kind of a civil marriage years ago, Jessica did never get a chance to walk down the aisle of a church holding her father's arm wearing the wedding gown of her choice, perhaps a white gown embroidered with ornamental laces short in the front with a longer train in the back, to see her groom waiting for her arrival and then sit face to face with her life partner---an elaborate ceremony every Christian woman under the sun, the richest or the poorest, fervently wishes to enjoy when she is married and kissed by her husband amidst their relatives.
The world would not have come to learn the story of 'the romance unfulfilled' had a disaster not befallen Rojas on August 5 when he along with his 32 fellow colleagues found himself trapped 2,300 feet underground as the San Jose gold and copper mine in Chile, where he works as a maintenance mechanic, had caved in.

Trapped half a mile underground Esteban Rojas asked for his sweetheart Jessica Ganiez's hand in matrimony in his note on a scrap paper saying "When I get out, let's buy the dress and we'll get married." And even though Jessica, 43, responded to romantic Rojas, 44, with an enthusiastic yes, they may have to wait maybe till the Christmas Day before Rojas gets a chance to kiss the bride as an escape shaft for rescuing the trapped miners the Chilean engineers have already started drilling may take not less than four months to be complete.

Like the love note from Rojas to Jessica many more such notes from loved ones are being passed back and forth through a narrow duct---the only lifeline---through which plastic tubes called "doves" containing supplies ranging from bedding, glucose, hydration gels, liquid nutrients, medicine and clean underwear to diversions such as iPods and gaming consoles have been lowered to the trapped miners to keep them alive physically and also mentally.

"Can you imagine? After 30 years of marriage we will start sending each other love letters again," another 51-year old wife Ramirez said, giggling despite her exhaustion, as she was preparing herself to write a letter in response to a note saying "I would see you soon" she received from her 63-year-old husband Mario Gomez, another miner trapped underground.

When it is time you are not pretty sure whether you are going to live long or short a rupture of emotions overwhelms you. You become desperate; you beseech your beloved ones to forgive you if you ever did hurt him or her. When it is time you are not pretty sure whether your beloved one is going to live long or short the gate that fought back the flood of your emotions suddenly opens up. You become frantic; you cannot wait to forgive your beloved one even if you were hurt by him or her.

Many of the Chilean miners trapped underground are hoping for life as well as preparing for death. Dying---not death---is terrible. Their preparation for death is different from those who prepare for death from illness. Poised between life and death the trapped miners are unresolved over some important issues and with some significant relationship and they would like to linger on in order to finish whatever needs finishing even though they are at death's door.

Isn't it better to say "I love you, dear" right now before you or I get trapped half a mile underground?