3/3/2007 - Happy Wedding Anniversary to me and mine!
.. Posted in Personal I came across this moving story the other day, and just couldn’t help but post it. I didn’t intend to keep it for my wedding anniversary date - the marriage in the story really has no resemblance to mine, but 'tis a lovely story nonetheless.
The Last Chapter (condensed) by Elizabeth Livingston
In a stormy marriage, all’s well that ends well.
“I love you, Bob” “I love you, too, Nancy”. It was 2am and I was hearing the voices of my parents through the thin wall separating my bedroom from theirs. Their loving reassurances were sweet, touching and surprising.
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 honoured, and we had a wonderful day. In hindsight, it was a very important celebration, because shortly after, things began to change for my parents. As debilitating dementia settled in, their marriage was about the only thing they would not lose. It began when their memories started to fade. Besides the frequent house-wide hunts for glasses and car keys, there were the groceries left behind on the supermarket counter, the notices for bills left unpaid. Soon my parents couldn’t remember names of friends, then of their grandchildren. Finally they did not remember that they even had grandchildren.
Financial control was the next thing to go. For all 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.
Now I took over the finances. Finally – and on doctor’s 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 my father came home after a brief hospital stay.
We’d 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 had disappeared. She asked again and again where he was, 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 towards her and she towards 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 vigour, 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 the 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. Early the next morning, I once again heard their voices through the thin 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.
Today, my partner and I have been married for twenty-three years, and apart for much of the same. Tomorrow we two relatively still new and near perfect traveling companions, are getting away together, for a couple of days to "Where the hell are we?". You have no idea how much we are both looking forward to it. And when we get back, and as time goes on, and I blog some of the photos, I (?we....a few phone calls later)...try very very hard to remember where that photo was taken and the names of the places we went to see. Big smiles Dee
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