The priceless gift my best friend bequeathed me

Alas, your death made me run out of excuses.

So, no matter how confronting your extraordinary feat is to me now, I cannot deny its reality any longer, because I personally experienced your triumph as a black and white fact.

Before your death I kidded myself believing that sure, there could be moments of unconditional loving, but then every ordinary person would just revert to conditional loving, if loving at all.

I clang to the belief that only the most extraordinary people like Socrates, Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mandela were capable of rising to the challenge of devoting their lives to unconditional loving.

But I saw it as beyond me, thank you very much.

Ken, of the many examples of your routinely living a life of unconditional loving here are just two.

The first relates to an incident that took place when you visited an underdeveloped country and you were robbed.

The thief pulled the wallet out of your pocket and tried to run away with it, but you noticed this, gave him a chase and caught him.

You reprimanded him and wanted to hand him over to the police.

Then you opened your valet and gave him money.

This story reminds me of the scene in Victor Hugo's La Miserables, where an act of true unconditional love towards the criminal Jean Valjean saws the seed for transforming him to devoting his life from thereon to helping others, even his worst enemy, his relentless persecutor, Javert.

Is is a remarkable story, alas it only happened in a romantic fiction.