Fifty Years!

This is dedicated to love and hope and being with the right person through thick and thin.  This is written in celebration not sadness.  This is my opportunity to recognize the rarity of true love and the miracle of commitment.  This is a confession that I never understood how uncommon the partnership my parents shared was until we faced the most severe of challenges together.  Even then that understanding was not truly cemented until I met my husband and had the opportunity to share that same gift; true love, deep respect, and friendship.  This is a commemoration of two lives brought together by chance.  Two people who barely knew themselves before they bound their lives together in marriage and shared their dreams.  They had two children together, lived in almost twenty homes together, and owned a business together.  On November 4^th 2011 they would have celebrated 50 years of marriage together.

When my husband and I were engaged and busy making plans for our big day and life after that with our new family I decided to read the letters my parents had exchanged when they were engaged.  The letters were a joy to read and showed them young and in love and planning for a life together.  My Mum was rather bossy at times in these letters and my Dad was tender, neither of which I saw very often when I was growing up.  It was a dynamic that I saw more of the older I got and came to realize that my Mum’s quiet strength complemented my Dad’s ambition and big personality.  Equally, men of my Dad’s generation were not demonstrative but his tenderness was always there and he respected my Mum and her opinion with all his being.

One of the most beautiful moments I have ever witnessed, and I say again that this is written in celebration, not sadness, was when my Mum asked my Dad to share with her what he was going to say at her funeral.  Despite him trying to hide it, my Mum had worked out that my Dad had been writing her eulogy. My breath catches whenever I think of it and the bravery they demonstrated, my Mum for asking and my Dad for honoring her wish.  He asked to wait until he felt he had it perfected and then one evening he quietly said, and he was not a shy retiring man, that he was ready.  He had written it down but he did not look at the sheet of paper in his hand, instead he looked into my Mum’s eyes and never wavered for a moment.  He spoke slowly and steadily and before long my Mum and I were holding each others’ hands and had tears streaming down our cheeks.  He soldiered on, missing his partner and friend already but wanting to pay her this tribute, wanting the opportunity to tell her what she meant to him and what their life together meant to him before she was gone.  He finished with a poem by Leo Marks he had found and read to her before:

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
And yours

I dedicate this blog to my Mum and Dad in celebration of their 50^th Wedding Anniversary.