Would you marry the girl you love - just to give her the day of her dreams - even though you knew she’d die a week later?

Would you call your husband a “caring father”, even though he killed your son in his death plunge off a balcony? Or would you condemn him?

Last week we reported on the bittersweet wedding of Aimee Chandler-Honnor and Oliver (Oli) Kaszas, both 23. On July 28 they got married; seven days later she died.

They were childhood sweethearts, who met as 11-year-olds at Elliot School in Putney.

At 19, she developed a brain tumour. Doctors removed it, but last month - during a holiday with Oli in Cornwall - Aimee fell ill again. The cancer was back and she had little time left.

Oli proposed and loved ones rallied round her hospital bed to give her the wedding of her dreams. On the day, Aimee even managed to walk down the aisle on her father’s arm and open the dance floor with her bridegroom.

"To witness the love between Oli and Aimee was the most uplifting and magical feeling, and also the saddest,” said close friend Phoebe Fraser.

“If I ever find love like I saw between the childhood sweethearts, I will be truly the happiest anyone can be."
When we see such love, we admire it. For we know that it takes immense courage.

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken,” the author CS Lewis wrote.

“If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

“But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

We need more of the “even though”-kind of love in this world. It happens when people choose to love, no matter what. Even though you know you’ll get hurt. Even though you have been hurt.

And who could be hurt more deeply than Natasha Hogan, whose husband killed their six-year-old son by plunging off a hotel balcony in Crete.

John Hogan first threw little Liam over the railing before jumping off himself with their two-year-old daughter Mia. She miraculously survived with a broken arm, while the father remains in hospital in Greece.

Yet in a remarkable tribute, 34-year-old Natasha did not utter a single word of criticism about the man she was apparently trying to leave.

Instead, she said: “His action is felt to have been completely out of character for the caring father that he was to both Liam and Mia.”

Her strength of spirit far outweighs his act of weakness.
But perhaps one of the best examples of courageous love is that between Dick Hoyt and his disabled son Rick.

Strangled by his umbilical cord at birth, Rick do little more than jerk his head from side to side. Rigged up on a computer that he controls with that movement, he can painstakingly type out words.

When his high school organised a charity run for a class mate who got paralysed, Rick pecked out: “Dad, I want to do that."

Dick had never run more than a mile in his life, but he pushed his son for five that day. It changed both their lives. “Dad," Rick typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!"

Since then, Dick has pushed his son in 88 marathons of 26.2 miles each. Eight times he not only pushed Rick that distance in a wheelchair, but also pulled him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and cycled 112 miles with his 110-pound body in a seat on the handlebars – all on the same day.

Now aged 66 and 44, their best marathon time is 2hr 40min 47sec - just 35 minutes over the world record.

Would Dick ever run on his own? “No way," he told Sports Illustrated last year. He does it purely for “the awesome feeling" he gets seeing the smile on his son’s face as they run, swim and ride together.

And Rick? “The thing I'd most like,” he typed, “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."

Would you dare to love like that?