Due to the way that our medium functions, we writers have a natural tendency to write about things which people have already written about. This leaves a huge chunk of our job undone — there are a million lines written about rulers, military figures, and other people we dub “successful”, and often zero lines for many good people who are much more worth writing about. And I too (even though I write about concepts, other than people) largely follow tendencies. But this essay will be different. I wouldn’t have known Iliya and Milka if they weren’t my relatives, but I have learned more from them than from any book that I have read, so I want to put at least some of it in print, to celebrate their lives.

It is not customary to write one obituary about two people, but Iliya and Milka’s lives were so interlinked, that there is really no point in trying to untangle one from another: they both were born around the 1920s in small villages. They both came to Sofia very young, and quickly met each other and married (AFAIK neither of them had any other intimate relationships). They lived together in Sofia, Bulgaria, for the rest of their lives, which extended for nearly 100 years, to the 2020s.

Before coming to Sofia, Iliya volunteered for the army and fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. “They were recruiting at the time I had to do my compulsory military service. So I thought that if I am going to be a soldier anyways, I might as well go to war.” He was proud of what he did, but, although he was on the side of the good guys, he never glorified the war. When I was young, he told me that the scar on his arm was from falling from a cherry tree. I was wondering why it was shaped like a hole.

After he got wounded and discharged, he was a village teacher for a few years and then he decided he wanted more of life and he escaped his family to go live in Sofia, the capital.

Milka was coming from a bigger and more developed village (some people had electricity), but like most women born at that time, she didn’t have many opportunities to shine besides home crafts — a practice at which she was completely unsurpassed: till her death, she provided all my family with hand-crocheted sweaters, and, using the leftover yarn, created blankets and embroideries which were true works of art. I am inclined to think that her attention to detail was noticeable from her teenage years. When she turned 18, a family friend recommended her for some government administration job in Sofia. They met there, and shortly after they married (without seeking permission from their parents).

By going to Sofia, they made probably the biggest cultural leap that any person from any generation had made: the jump from pre-modern times to modernity.

Not only did they leave their villages and their families for the big city, they also left farming, which was their only source of income (of food really), and the only thing that they knew how to do, for professions, of which they didn’t have any idea about (in a society, of which they didn’t have any idea). They also left the monarchic “Kingdom of Bulgaria” for the communist “People’s Republic of Bulgaria” (and later capitalist). They left the life which was based on religion, for one where religion was forbidden.

And they did all that without ever (even after 70 years of living in the city) forgetting where they came from. They did shop at supermarkets, but they rarely bought processed foods and they continued farming their own food till old age (in their home villages). They also continued making their own clothes, remodeling their house by themselves, and living humbly, just as they did at the time when “bread was everything”. They got some good professions (Iliya became an engineer), bought a home, travelled around the world, and did all the things that we do in the modern world, but they did none of those things to excess, they never did them with the idea to prove something to somebody. The kinds of excess that fill so much of modern life — drinking, self-assertion, raising one’s voice — were alien to them.

“We used to sing when we got together when we were young,” Milka said to me once, “It seems that people don’t sing anymore.”

She also said this shortly before she died:

“We weren’t something special, but we were together.”

But I don’t agree with her. Being together is special.

OK, the thing that I actually want to say about Milka and Iliya is this: they were in love. Some people try to convince me love doesn’t exist, but no way, I have seen it. All their life, they spent together, no regrets, no sourness, nothing but positive feelings.

“Only the people who are in love live, others merely exist.” Iliya used to say, supposedly quoting Shakespeare (I didn’t find any evidence of Shakespeare saying something similar).

“Ever since he died, I dream of him every night.” Milka told me this some four years after losing her partner.

And if you wonder how is this possible, how did they manage to stay in love all their lives, the answer is quite simple: they were good people. They respected and cared for each other just as they respected and cared for everyone else around them. They never fell for any of the modern (“modern” in the historical sense) tendencies to devalue our fellow human beings. There wasn’t, for example, any kind of misogyny from Iliya towards his wife, although we hear that treating women badly was “normal” for their generation, and for at least two generations that followed.

Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because of the many dangers that they had to face, in their final days they didn’t feel any fear of death at all. Milka used to joke when we visited the cemetery: “Look how much space there is,” she said, gesturing at the niche where her parents’ ashes stood.

And when, during the worst economic collapse, in which they lived with less than a dollar a day, their daughter offered to help them with money, Iliya was furious: “What, you are calling us poor? I am 70 years old. I can eat, and I can also not eat. You are poor!”

So, that is it. They were good people and they were happily in love. I am not sure if that’s rarer than being “successful”, but I am completely positive that it is much more important and worthy of an obituary.