Old Love

On June 7, 2008, John Robert Chubbuck, my cousin, married his college sweetheart, Stacey Sheely. Our entire family traveled to Oklahoma City to celebrate their union. Although the rehearsal dinner, wedding, and reception all remain worthy of my mention, one episode has lingered in my mind, particularly today. After the ceremony, Dad told our family about how he witnessed John Robert’s grandmother being escorted to her seat before the wedding. As the usher guided her to her seat, her husband of many years, already seated and gripping his oxygen tank, recognized her approach, and his expression immediately changed. He smiled and unabashedly admired her, letting a little “ooohhh” escape his lips as if they two remained the only people in the room. Even though he may not have recalled the names and faces of old friends he would see at the reception later, he undoubtedly knew her as his own, the wife of his youth.

As Dad recounted the story for our family, his eyes filled with tears as he looked to my mother. Today, a client visited my office, seeking help for her husband of sixty-four years who suffers from dementia. He sits at the Rainbow Nursing Center in Bristow, eats pudding, and speaks absently about cows and horses he has not owned in years. I noticed the same look in her eyes as she described her brilliant husband: It was an expression of passion. Thinking back on the wedding, I remembered the Pastor spoke of a bond that continues until a husband and wife are separated by death-A wedding is only the beginning of the story, a moving tribute to young love over in a matter of hours. Although our society is seemingly transfixed by sex, intimacy, although related, is an emotional bond that grows beyond that fateful wedding night. It is achieved at the moment we begin to rejoice in the familiar in our spouse, and it is compounded by the shared history of a life spent together. It is the comfortable way our hands link together without intention. It is the strange warmth in the pit of my stomach at the sound of his laugh. It is the way I hardly sleep without the sound of my best friend sleeping beside me.

One day, when our bodies and minds begin to fail, it is the connection that will always bring me back to that moment where our story began and remind me of the skinny handsome boy nervously standing directly to my right. Oh, young love is so very sweet, but I think I am beginning to understand that old love is just as sweet. Cheers to the Bride and Groom….May the entirety of your story be as sweet as its beginning….