Hard times are part of any good love story.

For Barb Johnson, the hardest came last winter, during what should have been a typically joyful Christmas season.

But instead of holiday cheer, her world was filled with fear and confusion, as the love of her life and South Dakota's senior U.S. senator lay in a drug-induced coma following a brain hemorrhage and emergency surgery.

Sen. Tim Johnson's sudden, life-threatening illness - caused by collection of malformed veins in the brain - made national news. It raised questions about his political future. It had reporters pestering his staff for updates and writing stories about the process of replacement and a possible shift in the balance of political power in the U.S. Senate.

All that was lost on Barb Johnson. As her husband fought for his life and their future together, she existed in a blurred landscape of home and hospital, where each day was a struggle for focus.

"I remember some of the darkest days, thinking there were so many decisions, 'How am I going to do all this?'" Barb Johnson said last week during a rare interview.

One day at a time? Even that was often too much to comprehend. So she broke each day down into its simplest, most immediate parts: "I'd walk across the street. I'd go into the hospital. I'd get on the elevator."

Oh, and there was one more thing: She'd love her guy. That was the easy part.

Loving Tim is second nature for Barb Johnson. It has been for more than 40 years. They met on the first weekend of the fall semester of 1965, as a couple of freshmen at the University of South Dakota.

"He was a good-looking guy with a blond crew cut," Barb said. "He had been a high-school football star and still had the athletic look."

Yet Tim Johnson's most appealing feature lived beneath that blond crew cut.

"I was most attracted by his intellect, and the fact that he had traveled with his family," she says. "His father had been a teacher and had taken the family to both coasts during the summer, and pursued graduate courses. I was the oldest of seven children, and travel for my family was a trip to Osakis, Minn., to visit our cousins."

They had their first date in January of 1966, attending the USD theater department production of "The Music Man."

That began a production of their own that led to marriage, a home, a family, individual careers and Tim's monumental move from part-time public service in the South Dakota Legislature to full-time duties in the U.S. House and, finally, the Senate.

It was a life of extraordinary change, challenges and accomplishments. Yet one thing hasn't changed from those starry-eyed days at USD.

"He's still my guy," Barb said.

That's true now more than ever, as his recovery reaches a point where a return to the Senate is a matter of "when" rather than "if," and a re-election campaign in 2008 seems a better than even possibility.

Barb Johnson patiently answered questions about politics in the interview last week. But it was clear that her husband's standing as a candidate was much less meaningful than his stature as a man and qualities as a husband.

She still has a crush on that kid from Vermillion, you see, after 38 years of marriage. Time and her husband's current physical disabilities haven't changed that a bit.

Quite the contrary, in fact. The latest medical challenge in a married life that includes three previous bouts with cancer seems to be strengthening this love story.

"Watching him handle this whole thing, wow, I just can't help loving him twice as much as before," she said. "If it were me, maybe because of my Irish roots, I'd be angry a lot of the time. I would be telling people off. And he never has. He just says, 'Tell me what I have to do,' and does it."

What Tim Johnson has done so far is exceed the recovery expectations of both his doctors and his family and put himself in a position to return to one of the most influential political bodies on the face of the earth.

That's heady, important stuff, intrinsically connected to the essential affairs of state and nation. Barb understands and respects that. But she also knows something else.

Now more than ever, he's her guy.

And that's what matters most.

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com