This Love Goes On and On

The Boston Herald

I have to piece together their love story. I know so little of it. I don't know him, and I hardly know her, for I have been privy to only the briefest outline of her life. And yet she inspires me. She's 90 and still in love with her husband - not just fond of him, or devoted to him, or committed to fulfilling an obligation. She's in love. She says his name and her face softens. She tells stories about him and her eyes shine like a girl’s.

We met six, maybe seven years ago at a place where we both vacation, and though we saw each other for a few days once a year across a room, or nodded in a lobby, though we said our hellos and how-are-yous, we never sat down and talked until last summer. I don't know why it took so long. For years she was busy attending to her husband.  She was with him, and I was with my family, and I suppose we were both reluctant to impose upon the other. So many polite social conventions keep us human beings apart. 

I regret now all the time I didn't spend with her. One day last summer we sat in a place we both love, on a bench overlooking the Atlantic, the sun warming us, and got past all the social amenities. We talked for hours, our friendship discovered that day. I think it had always been there, waiting to be mined.This day we crossed over the line that separates acquaintances from friends.

She invited me into her world, and took me on a guided tour, which began at her childhood. It was a brief tour, only an outline of her life, really, for how could a few hours ever possess a century of days?

Yet what they did hold was the essence of this woman. She talked with equanimity about the good and the bad, about a privileged childhood that afforded her the best of upbringings, but that also saw her trapped in Switzerland with her family at the outbreak of World War I. She talked about personal losses and gains -- with the wisdom of an accountant who knows that a life, like a ledger is made up of profits and losses.

But what she mostly talked about, what connected all the years of her adult life, was her husband, Lawrence. I've heard young women speak about their new husbands in the tone she used when she spoke of Lawrence. I've heard parents talk about their children that way. But I'd never before heard that combination of wonder and pride and privilege in the voice of a 90-year-old. My guess is that it was there from the beginning. Since they met, he has been the most important person in her life. Lawrence used to read all the time. He knows everything. He studied everything. He is the wisest, most intelligent, most amazing man she knows. He loved music, good food, good wine, the cold, the heat, the ocean, the mountains, day, night. He loved life! That's what she told me.

But what I heard in her tone was the amazement still, after a lifetime of years, that he also loved her. After marriage and children and grandchildren and a great-grandchild, she is still awed by this one, unassailable fact, that of all the women in the world, Lawrence chose her. She took care of him at home when old age robbed him of his ability to walk. She helped him get from his bed to his chair. She pushed him around their apartment and out the door and into the elevator and out onto the street, where she wheeled him into stores and restaurants. Aides came to help her do the things she couldn't do herself. But eventually she couldn't handle him alone. 

She chose the best nursing home for him, the best she could find, though it's a bus ride and a train ride and a cab ride away. She visits him every weekend, making the two-hour trip by herself, spending Saturday and Sunday with him, arriving back at her apartment late Sunday night.

She never says things like, 'Life is so unfair,' or 'I don't know how much longer I can do this.' She says, 'Lawrence loves having me read to him. So I sit and read. I stayed with him until late Christmas evening and also the next day. It was a lovely holiday. We were together.’

'We used to eat caviar on New Year's eve,' she said last week when I phoned. She wasn't lamenting the present. She was doing what she so often does, remembering the past, her voice full of the joy and the wonder I always hear when she speaks his name.