Longevity

Longevity          

Looking in that dark, cold grave I couldn’t believe that 40 years earlier, almost to the day, I stood in the same spot as we buried my grandfather.  Now she lay just 12 inches from the man she loved so dearly. 

All my life I heard Marguerite tell me how she missed him daily.  For most of my childhood I was aware that she made a daily visit to the cemetery.  I wondered what she did out there and finally asked her.  “I know he is not here, but I feel close to him just the same,” she told me.    She continued that ritual of sitting on the bench near the headstone, arranging the flowers, and meditating.  Each and every day she would drive to the grave on her way home from her part-time job as a receptionist.  Finally we admonished her to not make the visit due to the fact that several robberies had occurred at the cemetery.    When she became a robbery victim we convinced her to make her visits to the cemetery with a friend or one of us.  After a while the visits only happened on the weekends.  Then, after about 30 years, the visits stopped. 

I knew my grandmother missed her husband and felt pain at not visiting him.  Every year an expensive bouquet of flowers was placed on his grave at Christmas, Easter, and his birthday.    Some of my family could not understand why she went to such expense.  I began to understand her sacrifice.  When I visited with her, somehow our conversation would move to how she missed him deeply, and the fact that his death was something with which she would never recover.  “You just learn to live life without him,” she would tell me.  After all the years she still loved him deeply.  Never before had I witnessed such a testimony of love in one life.

My mother’s heart disease has given them much stress over the past 30 years.  Lately the trips to the hospital have been more frequent as she deals with a weak heart and advanced age. The last trip to the hospital was quite stressful for us all.    But something happened as they left the hospital that day, and it made me smile.  Walking down the hall together, he reached out his hand and grabbed hers.  Like two young sweethearts they walked out the hospital door, grateful for another day to build on their 60 years of marriage. 

This deep love was a mystery to me until I married a wonderful woman some 27 years ago.  I see myself in both my grandfather and my father; they say we favor.  Commitment is a word that comes to mind as I think about our family’s longevity in marriage.  Periods in marriage are stressful and I am sure there were days that my grandparents and parents would have questioned their decision to get married.  But in our family we were taught that loyalty is an important character trait.  A promise is binding, and certainly a vow, in church, meant forever.  I am thankful to have been taught this secret to a long marriage relationship.  I am thankful to have seen a deep love modeled for me. 

It is now our turn.  We hold the same values of our parents and have done our best to teach them to our child.  For our daughter, our prayer is that she, too, will find a young man with similar family experiences who will also share the same deep love of the generations.