Some time ago, I was doing visitation in an area hospital and spotted an elderly woman sitting in the lobby in a wheelchair and covered with a blanket.
She was by herself and I wondered if she had come to the hospital to be seen by someone or if she was waiting on someone. So, being a curious sort, I stopped to talk.
She had indeed been seen and was waiting on the result of tests. Later in our conversation, she leaned in and said, “This weekend, my husband and I will have been married 65 years.”
“Wow,” I replied. “That’s quite a milestone.” “Son,” she said. “That’s not a milestone. It’s a miracle!”
She was dead serious as she said, “Why, in fact, we have almost nothing but our children in common. We don’t like the same food, the same TV programs, or the same music. I’m a ‘glass half full’ kind of person and he’s a ‘glass half empty’ guy. Nope, nothing in common. It’s not a milestone. It’s a genuine miracle, that’s what it is.”
I smiled and offered my congratulations.
It could be, of course, that this couple has a deep love that has seen them through 65 years in spite of the lack of commonality. After all, they would have come through the Great Depression, World War II, and countless difficulties and struggles together.
Even when she was going on about how they had nothing in common, she had a twinkle in her eyes and a smile on her face.
It could also be that they are both stubborn and persistent people, refusing to give up. I had to wonder, however, that, if they had been born in a later generation, would they have made it?
Her husband (who was at a doctor’s appointment in another part of the building) was 91 and I would guess that she was about the same age. If I accurately looked up the correct statistics, the divorce rate in 1926 (about the year they would have married) was 7 percent, radically unlike today’s divorce rate of 50 percent. There was a stigma surrounding divorce in that era. People just didn’t get divorced back then.
If they had been married, say, in 1970, would they still be married? I have no idea, of course, but I do believe that there is something to just “gutting it out.”
My wife and I have been married for over 43 years and I sometimes consider that a miracle as well.
Like this couple, we don’t like the same music, often don’t like the same TV programs, and we are far apart on many issues.
We do have more in common than they did, but I was struck by the realization that a great many couples who married around the same time as my wife and I are no longer together. In truth, a great many of my high school classmates have been divorced at least once.
This couple, celebrating 65 years of marriage, would have weathered many storms through the decades. They would have experienced deprivation, low paying jobs, a lack of good medical care (even medicines, vaccinations, and antibiotics), and life would have been hard. Still, they were together.
Milestone? Absolutely. Miracle? Perhaps. Or maybe they just never gave it much thought.
Maybe they meant it when, so long ago, they said to each other, “for richer, for poorer … for better, for worse … in sickness and in health … until death we do part.”
[David Epps is the pastor of the Cathedral of Christ the King, Sharpsburg, GA (www.ctkcec.org). He is the bishop of the Mid-South Diocese which consists of Georgia and Tennessee (www.midsouthdiocese.org) and the Associate Endorser for the Department of the Armed Forces, U. S. Military Chaplains, ICCEC. He may contacted at frepps@ctkcec.org.]
