Sometimes I read stories and store them. Something else feels more pressing at the time so I write about that. I tucked this one away at the end of June...

Much fun has been made of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his recent conviction on corruption and conspiracy charges. Illinois has been mocked as the land of jailed governors, and why not? It's had its fair share no doubt. And the laughing is good. If we couldn't laugh, what would be the alternative? Yeah, better to laugh.

But the tragic consequences of illicit behavior are often obscured over time.   They always start very close to home. We sometimes forget that there are real people involved when leaders fail.

The governor before Blagojevich, George Ryan, went to jail too. He's been incarcerated since 2007 and is scheduled to be released in 2013.

He and his wife Lura Lynn were married for fifty-five years and were together for sixty-three. She told Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times that she met George for the first time in their freshman high school English class in Kankakee, Illinois.

"I knew when I saw him that he would be my husband," she said. "And I will never forget the time he took a bus to visit me. I lived a long way out of town. And our parting kiss took so long George missed the bus and had to walk five miles back to town."

When her husband was convicted she told Sneed, "I haven't cried, and I'm not going to now. It's the way George and I have always handled things. I just have to believe he will come home."

The longest she had been away from her husband in all those years, Sneed writes, was ten months when he served in Korea. Now she waited by the phone each night for a call from her husband who was away from her in jail.

Shortly after Ryan was locked up, cancer was discovered in one of Lura Lynn's lungs. The governor was jailed in Terre Haute, Indiana as she fought for her life in Kankakee for almost four years. He petitioned the court for early release to be with her, but was denied.

She died in June.

I can't imagine the anguish in his tortured soul, the retching in his mind...and how lonely she must have been as she battled without him into the night.

In the final months of her life, a compassionate prison warden arranged for several trips to Kankakee for Ryan so he could visit with his deteriorating wife. He was at her bedside when she was removed form the ventilator and died. He was there, but she was so heavily sedated that she didn't know it.

And then he went back to jail.

We don't often enough see the big picture of what our actions today may produce in time. We don't ponder how they might affect ourselves and others. We are so often caught up in our tiny world and the expediency of a moment.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But power doesn't negate sorrow. Title doesn't negate suffering.   Leaders sometimes think they are immune. They are not. Human tragedy seeks us all, and if we open the door, it will welcome itself.  

Lift your eyes off of the moment and set them on the long view, onto that thing that really does matter most. Let your choices be guided by it.

Lura Lynn died. She died without George ever coming home.