Keeping Our Word(s)

Getting into our car on the cold and snowy night of December 22, 1985 following our wedding reception in New Canaan, CT. The event manager at the club had placed two turkey sandwiches and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot under the driver’s seat. We later learned that we had left our passports and airline tickets at Debbie’s parents, graciously delivered by her father the following morning.

The progression of our lives over the past 16 months has been predictable in some ways and surprising in others. September 6, 2019, and the immediate days thereafter, were inscribed with two words that are difficult to say, let alone contemplate: fear and sadness. Shortly after receiving this news, I got in contact after several years with a friend who shared his family’s personal journey and put hope back into our lives. He said that the days after his wife’s ALS diagnosis provided some of the happiest and most sustaining moments in his life; and I can say without hesitation that he was right. In fact, we all shared the evening of our 25th Anniversary ten years ago, learning for the first time how someone who had lost their ability to speak could transfer all that intellectual activity to writing on something called a Boogie Board. They are rather unremarkable low-tech devices, like an Etch-a-Sketch, that capture words for a fleeting moment and, then, are gone with the touch of a button. Technology has progressed. Now we have Zoom whiteboards or Chat windows and the Scribble app and Google Docs and so many novel ways to capture those words. Forever, in the physical sense, if needed.

As we counted down the days to our 35th Anniversary on December 22, we arrived at another such moment. As many of you know and have witnessed, the relentless adversary has taken Deb’s speech, leaving us only fleeting moments for limited verbal communication. Like the first days in September 2019, it is a difficult passage; but we are finding treasures even in this new communication era. So we want to catch up with all of you as we emerge from a distinctive Advent season and let you know how we are doing. It is a season of crystalline moments that appear in the smallest things. We see moments each day with a razor-sharp clarity that we lacked before. I recently called this “HD time” when speaking to a friend, for the high-definition significance that each moment can bring. And, of course, there is more time listening to our internal voice, so much of which is intricately wound together with each other’s heart after spending nearly every day together for four decades. When that voice is paired with faith and hope, we can lift above our circumstances. That is where we try to go each day and with every opportunity. It is the best offer available to us. Why wouldn’t we?

We are fortunate, in many ways, as we go through this phase. Building upon a life of nearly 37 years, many of the big discussions have already occurred. Somewhere in these posts, I remarked that our goal has been to live in Truth. Truth has been a subject much under scrutiny in the past few decades of our marriage, and terms like “anti-science” have become verbal weapons used to distinguish between a sense of reality that is empirically measurable and what I am describing which points to more eternal constants and a sense of where we derive ultimate meaning. On the former, we have never had disagreements; and, on the latter, we have arrived at an understanding of our union through decades of care and nurture of that relationship built on ground that we discovered together. It is bigger than either of us is alone, built with great effort, self-awareness, study, and conversation. It was also sustained by the support and example of so many of you who are reading this and taking this journey with us. So, in a sense, a hug or squeeze of the hand or kiss or knowing glance or coy smile or shake of the head in disagreement contain investments in time and effort. They are a short-hand, grounded in our shared life, on which we increasingly lean.

How it looks on any given day depends on the day with which we are presented. We are increasingly creatures of routines. No surprise. Every child looks at their parents as they age and thinks “I will never be like that, so stuck in routine.” Well, in some ways due to our circumstances, I guess we entered that time of life a bit earlier. The routines are the rhythms that move us through the days now: getting up and going, walks, times preparing and eating meals together, errands. And, back to my HD reference, they take on new significance and reveal moments that contain more weight and meaning. We went out shopping and stood up a Christmas tree several weeks before Christmas. It was the most beautiful, tallest, and most expensive (gulp) tree ever to grace our home. We always place a red bow at the top rather than a star, and the annual debate (pitched battle, perhaps) over where to cut the top fell along predictable lines: I wanted to avoid scraping the ceiling and cut it too short and Deb wanted to be within a micron of that 9-foot height. She was frustrated over my intransigence. I made claims of potential property damage that would ensue. Annie shook her head, recognizing this Dad-made drama. The tree turned out fine, cut to within an inch of the ceiling as Deb requested. And within a day, it was full with ornaments, each unique, collected and curated since our first Christmas and Anniversary together in Hingham in 1986. A primary “love language” of Deb’s is “acts of service”, and the decoration of the house and continued focus on our new home has provided numerous non-verbal opportunities for me to add some investment capital to that account that I surely neglected in ways large and small over our lives.

I have wondered, as we travel through this time or as we age generally, whether we become more attentive partners because we soften or because we realize the things we held onto (the un-Truths) are revealed fully to us. As I rise in the mornings to face 2021 with all of its pandemic chaos and relentless political battles, I have a greater sense of peace. Perhaps it is the knowledge that our kids no longer need us in many of the ways they once did, so a weight is lifted. Perhaps it flows from having accomplished, from my side of the relationship, enough professional gains to loosen the grip on the wheel a bit. Certainly it is confirmed when we connect with family and friends for Zoom calls and reflect on the deep investments made in relationships that are built on honesty and genuine love. But I also see with greater clarity how, in some ways, we are always getting closer to a destination we knew was in front of us. We are all travelers who spend most of the journey in deep denial, living as if there will always be one more opportunity to say that which we avoided, shore up that relationship that we took for granted. Many “bucket list” items (a term I hate) are experiential and not relational. One of the gifts of our relationship has been a belief that this life was not nothing. What we were doing, and the waypoint to which we affixed our daily progress, was of transcendent importance. So, as we move into a time when the very foundation on which we built so much of our love and life together - language in all its forms - we still have ways to move through our days, build memories to sustain us when the days are brutal and hard, and find a new appreciation for the beauty we have been blessed to share with each other, our children, and the world around us.

I said at the beginning that fear and sadness were stops in this emotional journey. The fear is largely gone. We are living with our enemy, and we are taking its measure each day. It does not control or own us. Sadness is an occasional visitor, and we hold each other until it passes. I long for those deep conversations, the travels into our shared life through words that helped us mold its purpose and meaning. But I know what we built together. And I believe it was built on rock rather than sand. And, as we open each new day, it is another opportunity to reflect the light back to each other in new ways. Strangely, hope has moved in to reside where fear reigned for several months in 2019. It is reassuring. And it makes the hard stuff easier.

Even without words.

Note: I had proposed to Deb that we co-author this post, but it seems impractical to embark on such projects when we have so much coming at our shared time. So, instead, I asked Deb to proofread this post. The most important request we can make is that you initiate a Zoom/Scribble call with Deb. 1:1 works best. She will guide you through the process. Just send a text, email or write through the “get in touch” section of the site.