My husband went back to work today (Monday 03-30-09) and he seemed so relieved. He was exhausted when he got home, but he seemed more balanced and calm. He’s an incredibly healthy man, and it was his first surgery, so it must have been a huge relief for him to be back to normal.

Since writing Caged Animal Tamer I’ve thought quite a bit about marriage in general, about marriages that last a lifetime, and about the specifics of marriages I’ve known. How do marriages work when others around them are breaking down?

With my generation, it seems like they mostly break down. And yet, I’ve been married 29 years. Of course, if I’d stayed married to my first husband, I’d have been married 42 years. So I both prove and disprove what I said about my generation’s marriages.

I had a friend whose husband said, “I know you aren’t happy with me, but why do we have to get a divorce? Couldn’t we just be like your grandparents, living together without great love, but having our family around us and growing old together?”

Well, she wanted to be free to be with someone else, and didn’t want to admit that. Her answer was no they couldn’t, but without an explanation he could understand…until later.

The interesting part is that three months after her grandfather died, her grandmother died too. It reminded me of the tee shirt that says, “Caution! Old couples may be closer than they seem.” I know that you can’t accurately judge anyone else’s emotional connection with their life partner. Combative couples may be permanently welded together, and publicly devoted couples might be sleeping in separate bedrooms with loaded pistols under their pillows.

My great-uncle Dick was world famous for his overactive mouth. Common wisdom said it was his schmoozing that made him a bank president in a small Texas town. The man could talk about air, if all other subjects failed him. Aunt Hiawatha used to go to all sorts of lengths to get away from his unending conversation.

But about a year after Uncle Dick’s death she told her sister: “I can’t believe how I miss Dick’s big mouth. I’d give anything to have him sitting in his chair, blabbing for hours. He could gab without ever stopping, and I’d just sit next to him fanning him.”

BTW, Uncle Dick and Aunt Hiawatha were a scandal in the family because they had separate bedrooms. She said it had to be that way or he’d keep her up all night talking. I’m sure she was telling the truth! :-)

When my grandfather died my grandmother was 49. Everyone said she needed to get married again. She’d get all indignant and say, “No, I don’t. I’ve BEEN married. I don’t *need* to do it again.”

She was in her late eighties when she died in the nursing home. In her final year she spent most of her time with Jack, my grandfather. Sometimes, she’d try to have three-way conversations with granddaddy and one of my aunts. Usually though, she’d just tell them what she and Jack had been discussing earlier. Almost forty years after he’d left, and he was still the one she talked to the most. I had the impression they’d fallen in love all over again.

My father died eight months before my parents’ 50th anniversary. It was harder on my mother than she’d expected it to be. I can’t explain it, but I felt like she needed a 50th anniversary celebration, although nobody else thought so.

I got her one of those Silver Wedding Anniversary cake plates, a kitschy thing I knew she’d immediately put in the cedar chest, with the cake plate that had held her wedding cake. And we sent her a big bouquet of red roses. Because that’s what daddy would have done: roses, red ones, lots of them. Because it was their big anniversary. :-)

I think the most striking example of a long marriage I’ve ever seen was my husband’s parents. I met them when they were in their mid eighties. I met him first out in his garden, which he was quite proud of. I remember him telling me how strong and hardworking he was for his age. That’s true. His son is like him in that.

He also told me how hot it had been all across the country the summer after “the baby” was born. It had been a record breaking heat that year, I’d read about it. And he told me how hard they’d had to work to keep my husband alive. The fear, the love, the tenderness poured from him over fifty years later.

I met her in the house, being her crabby self…I’d been warned. She had diabetes and a bunch of other health issues, and she was blind. The general consensus in the family was that a woman who had twelve children had every reason in the world to be crabby. I can’t argue with that, and she was in pain, probably even more than she let on.

My big memory of her is that she insisted on cooking us breakfast. Oh mercy! Well, she wouldn’t be dissuaded, not even when the house filled with black smoke and I tried to get her to let me take over so she could rest. She just said something hateful and kept on stirring the bacon.

I don’t remember how we got rid of the food - thank goodness the woman was blind. I think my husband passed the food off to his father or brother. I said later, “But couldn’t she smell the smoke? We were all coughing our lungs out. And she bitched the whole time about how lazy and selfish we were to get up late and expect her to cook us breakfast, after we begged her not to cook!” All my husband said was, “That’s just mother.” :-)

A few years later she went into the nursing home. It took many months for my father-in-law to work it out so that he could go into the same nursing home, and another month or two to get himself installed in her room. The nursing home held firm that he had to wait until her roommate died before they’d move him into her room.

She died less than a year later. He moved back home. All he’d cared about was that she wasn’t alone. And I think he cared about being with her for his own sake too. But, mostly, he wanted to make sure she was treated right. Besides, it was probably easier to just live there, since he was there from the minute they opened until they closed anyway. :-)

That was eighteen years ago. I still get choked up at the way he wanted to go to the nursing home to live with her, and then went right back home after she was gone.

It can be difficult, when you’re young, to see the love and the shining moments in the lives of old people. We understand what we do, and why. We can forget that we weren’t the first to feel and do.

If you ever see a widow in red at the funeral, she may not be dancing on his grave. Maybe somebody reminded her that he loved to see her in red. :-)