ON ACCEPTANCE
‘Marriage is memory: marriage is time …‘
Joan Didion
Once I had seen the photo shared above it was impossible not to want to play with it as an image. Maybe it was the Founding Fathers look of the clothes we’re wearing, the colours and textures of the background or the slightly odd postures created by the angle of the shot, but it immediately felt like something that was calling out to be rendered in oil. The infinite reflections in the mirrors behind us only added to a sense of something composed with a painterly deliberation. Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Hockney’s My Parents and Myself in which he appears in the mirror behind them, like Van Eyck in The Arnolfini Portrait, came to mind, as did some of Hopper’s couples, despite our very obvious smiles. It felt as if we had somehow become part of that long history of formal paintings of couples, often commissioned as marriage portraits, that not only capture the two people involved but, in the choice of setting, the details in the clothing, the objects they are holding offer the observer a vivid sense of the behaviours, customs and values of other times.
Although the sense of there being an intended viewer made me feel disconcerted at first, I have become fond of this image for that very reason. The leather bag across my shoulder, the decision to not quite perch on the table, the empty glass in S’s hands, the phones held up camera-like in the reflections all come together to make it a suitably quirky metaphor for the day. The odd formality it suggests feels a peculiar fit, too, for my decision not to simply celebrate our 55th wedding anniversary with a party, we have always been good at parties, but to mark it with a ceremony in which we would renew our marriage vows.
The title of this piece I now realise already carries within it some of the complexities and paradoxes contained within this decision. The positioning of the words ‘I” and ‘we’ in the sentence signifies a relationship that is increasingly defined by our delineated roles; the ‘Carer’ and … ‘the person who is cared for’. Interestingly, just as there is no word for a parent who has lost a child, except in Arabic, there is no unique word or term, in English at least, for the person who receives care. Social services mostly use ‘client’, as if it’s simply a business contract while medical workers refer to ‘the patient’ as if the illness is the sole focus. Others turn to familial descriptors like ‘spouse’ or ‘partner’ or ‘husband’. All of them redolent of a reciprocal and equal relationship that can no longer exist. Yet the very fact that there is an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ in our case is deeply rooted in a marriage that has lasted fifty-five years. A marriage full of shared memories. A marriage that has extended over time. As more and more of us find ourselves having to face futures other than those we might have planned I sense we need desperately those words, to develop a language that might begin to give meaning to those shifting realities.
Once ‘I’ had made the decision that ‘we’ would mark this day by renewing the commitment we had made to each other in those original vows – for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – I was quickly aware it would be something I would be taking on on my own. I did speak about it with S. I suggested it was something we might both like to do. But I am learning to accept the future is no longer something we can plan together. Executive functioning, including the capacity to think ahead, make decisions, organise or plan are among the first things to disappear with behaviouralFTD. I knew I would be metaphorically flying solo,, even if I was certain it would be something we would find joy in together when the day came.
Choosing the church that had held us so lovingly as a couple and a family after Jamie’s death, helping us create a ceremony that reflected the rich web that was his life so perfectly, seemed the only place to start. I wanted to find a way to celebrate and show gratitude for the love and the friendships that have been such an important part of the history of our long marriage, with all its ups and downs. I also wanted to find space to acknowledge the strength, resilience and support it will take to make new meanings and memories in the times to come. Tosin, the new rector, listened to our story and created that space for us and our friends and family opened their hearts to it From the moment we entered the church the day was filled with joy, spirituality and meaningful connections. It was also a day that encompassed the grief, the pain and the loss which were such an important part of its reasoning.
Each time I decide to document and write about the unexpected journey my present life has become I have found myself doing what Joan Didion calls going to ‘the literature’, hoping to find the thoughts and words of others that might provide an anchor or a point of departure for my own. It has been fascinating then to find that so little has been written about long marriages, unless one counts Middlemarch and The Rainbow which I read for ‘A’ level English. But both of them seemed to focus on little more than the need for self-sacrifice. There is even less, apart from illness-focused memoirs, on how one learns to be a Carer for someone with whom one has always been in a partnership of equals. In an interview for the Paris Review, American writer George Saunders playfully describes long marriages, his own was twenty-five years old at the time, as one of the ‘under-narrated’ pleasures of life. I would simply want to include all its complexities as well as its pleasures in that description.
Without discovering poems or lines of wisdom from novels to turn to, I found myself going back to the reading from Corinthians on love, which, with Tosin’s help, I chose for the renewal of our marriage vows. The love it speaks of is not something starry-eyed, idealistic or romantic, although it has been all of those in our long history, but instead presents it as something that ‘bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’. It is love’s ability to do this and to be ‘patient’ and ‘kind’ in the face of all kinds of adversity that I wanted to remind myself of in planning this day. I also wanted to celebrate love’s capacity to ‘rejoice in the truth’, and, in doing so, lead us to want to be part of the struggle for justice that I know has been one of the lynchpins of our marriage. Love does and can ‘never end’ in that sense. It is often the times we set out together on marches for Palestine or take part in other struggles against oppression that remind me of how deep our connections and our love still run. And how, simply by being there, we receive so much love back from so many others.
One of our friends remarked what a strong sense of that kind of love he had found in the people who came together that day. Not everyone was able to be with us who would have wanted or who we might have wanted to join us. But as I turned to look at our eldest son, Luke, and saw so many friends, from the one who drove S to the hospital the day Luke was born, to old neighbours whose children grew up with ours, newer neighbours with whom we built community, friends made at college and work who became part of our extended family, friends we met through theatre, arts projects, political activism, the shared loss of children or finding ourselves ‘carers’ for husbands and spouses, and even friends of our children who have become our friends, I saw our history and I knew we were blessed. I also knew I had made the right decision.
This love that has been given to us and that we have shared with each other and with others was why I decided we would renew our marriage vows. What better reason could there be?
