By: Elizabeth Livingston
Reader’s Digest, Feb 2006
“My parents married on September 14, 1940 after a brief courtship…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…It was a miserable duet…Soon after [their 60th wedding anniversary], things began to change…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, notices of bills left unpaid. Soon my parents couldn’t remember names of friends, then 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.”
You could say my parent’s 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 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…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…[it all] was a brick in this unseen creation, a structure that reveals itself increasingly as the world around them falls apart.”
