“IN THEIR LOSS, THEY FOUND EACH OTHER”
By Elizabeth Livingston, page 16, Newsweek, January 10, 2005.
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“I love you, Bob.” “I love you, too, Nancy.” It was 2:00 a.m., and I was hearing my parents’ voices through the thin wall separating my bedroom from theirs. Their loving reassurances were sweet, touching— and surprising.
My parents married on September 14, 1940, after a brief courtship. She was nearing 30 and knew it was time to start a family. The handsome, well-educated man who came by the office where she worked looked like a good bet. He was captivated by her figure and her blue eyes. The romance didn’t last long.
Seeds of difference sprouted almost immediately: she liked to travel, he hated the thought; he loved golf, she did not; he was a Republican, she an ardent Democrat. They fought at the bridge table, at the dinner table, over money, over the perceived failings of their respective in-laws. To make matters worse, they owned a business together, and the everyday frustrations of life at the office came to roost at home.
There was a hope that they would change once they retired, and the furious winds did calm somewhat, but what remained steeled itself into bright, hard bitterness. “I always thought we’d…” my mother would begin, before launching into a precise listing of my father’s faults. The litany was recited so often, I can reel it off by heart today. As he listened, my father would mutter angry threats and curses. It was a miserable duet.
It wasn’t the happiest marriage, but as their 60th anniversary approached, my sister and I decided to throw a party. Sixty years was a long time, after all; why not try to make the best of things? We’d provide the cake, the balloons, the toasts, and they’d abide by one rule: no fighting.
The truce was honored. We had a wonderful day. In hindsight it was an important celebration, because soon after, things began to change for my parents. As debilitating dementia settled in, their marriage was about the only thing they wouldn’t lose.
It began when their memories started to fade. Added to the frequent house-wide hunts for glasses and car keys, were the groceries left behind on the counter and notices of bills left unpaid. My parents couldn’t remember names of friends, then of their grandchildren. Finally they didn’t remember that they had grandchildren.
These crises would have at one time set them at each other’s throats, but now they acted as a team, helping each other with searches, consoling each other with “Everyone does that,” or, “It’s nothing, you’re just tired.” They found new roles— bolstering each other against the fear of loss.
Financial control was the next thing to go. For all of their marriage, my parents stubbornly kept separate accounts. Sharing being unthinkable, they’d devised financial arrangements so elaborate they could trigger war at any time. He, for example, was to pay for everything outside the house, she for whatever went on inside. The ‘who-pays’ dilemma was so complex for one trip that they finally gave up traveling entirely.
I took over the books. Now no one knew how things got paid; no one saw how the columns that spelled their fortunes compared. Next, I hired a housekeeper. Cooking and cleaning, chores my mother had long complained about, were suddenly gone. Finally— on doctors orders— we cleared the house of alcohol, the fuel that turned more than one quarrel into a raging fire.
You could say my parents’ lives had been whittled away, that they could no longer engage in the business of living. But at the same time something that had been buried deep was coming up and taking shape. I saw it when thy father came home after a brief hospital stay.
We had tried to explain my father’s absence to my mother, but because of her memory, she could not keep it in her head why he disappeared. She asked again and again where he was, and again and again we told her. And each day her anxiety grew.
When I finally brought him home, we opened the front door to see my mother sitting on the sofa. As he stepped in the room, she rose with a cry. I stayed back as he slowly walked toward her and she toward him. As they approached each other on legs rickety with age, her hands fluttered over his face. “Oh, there you are,” she said, “there you are.”
I don’t doubt that if my mother and father magically regained their old vigor, they’d be back fighting. But I now see that something came of all those years of shared days— days of sitting at the same table, waking to the same sun, working and raising children together. Even the very fury they lavished on each other was a brick in this unseen creation, a structure that reveals itself increasingly as the world around them falls apart.
In the early morning I once again heard the voices through the wall. “Where are we?” my father asked. “I don’t know,” my mother replied softly.
How lucky they are, I thought, to have each other.
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(Pearl Before Swines, by Stephan Pastis, January 21, 2018)
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Psalm 71:9 — Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone.
Proverbs 5:18 — May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
II Corinthians 4:16 — Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
Matthew 19:4-6 — (Jesus said), “At the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Ecclesiastes 12:1 — Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them.”
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A PRAYER FOR MARRIED COUPLES:
O God, out of all the world you let us find one another and learn together the meaning of love. Let us never fail to hold love precious. Let the flame of it never waver or grow dim, but burn in our hearts as an unwavering devotion, and shine through our eyes in gentleness and understanding. Teach us to remember the little courtesies, to be swift to speak the grateful and happy word, to believe rejoicingly in each other’s best, and to face all life bravely because we face it with a united heart. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
–Walter Russel Bowie (1882-1969), Rector of Grace Episcopal Church, New York City
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