Building Our Fortress

Love is time, I read somewhere recently. When Brian and I married 23 years ago, I thought love was the reason we were marrying. If love is time, then just what was it that gave us the crazy notion that we should spend the rest of our lives together? (In hindsight, I would suggest that we thought the raw materials we saw in each other would make a darned good edifice.)

After 23 years, I think I might be more equipped to understand this definition of love. Leonard Cohen ends his poem, God is Alive, Magic is Afoot, with this enigmatic line: "time itself the magic length of God." There is something magical about time. Given enough time, we can forgive what we thought was unforgivable. Given enough time, an acorn will transform into a mighty oak, providing shade and shelter to many creatures. In time, as they say, all wounds heal.

When I was little, it seemed like every other week my parents were heading off to celebrate another couple's 25th wedding anniversary. One weekend it was their turn. I vaguely remember the gathering at a neighbour's house, the abundance of silver (in those days, actually affordable to many), the delicate cake, the men in ties, the women in their best finery. It was a special thing, but it was not an unusual thing, to witness a couple arriving at such a landmark.

Now-a-days, 25 years of marriage is an unusual thing indeed. Those who do arrive at this landmark are often circumspect about it. Should we celebrate with our friends when we are the exception, when so many marriages fail long before reaching 25 years? I have not been to a 25th anniversary celebration since I was a child. They just don't come around that often any more, and when they do, they don't tend to be celebrated in the grand manner that was more common a generation or two ago.

So, here we are... at 23 years, and with every reason to believe that we will see 25 years, and beyond. I marvel at all the territory that we have covered, looking back. Perhaps the most significant territory of all has been that of parenthood, a terrain that seems to either make or break a marriage. Becoming parents brings out all of our shining qualities, but invariably the weaknesses in our characters as well as in our own upbringing are brought to bear in moments of fatigue and stress. Parenting our children becomes an opportunity to re-parent ourselves in some ways. The willingness for each parent to go there is essential, I believe, for the survival of a marriage. Raising children has, by far, been the greatest testing ground for Brian and me, and may well be so for many couples. No one has received perfect parenting. That becomes so evident when we set out to parent our own children. The willingness, on both our parts, to not only parent our children, but to parent ourselves, as needed, has helped us to keep our marriage intact.

Because we have remained faithful to each other, our marriage remains strong. There are marriages that can survive a breach such as infidelity, but the costs in terms of healing and added effort are very great. And this reminds me of something about which I became acutely aware from the time we expressed our vows to each other: one's marriage is a separate entity from the individual parties. Marriage is its own sacred institution. In a way, it is not really about me, and it is not really about my spouse. We are only the caretakers. Something else is created when two people marry, and those two people become responsible to that entity.

It might have something to do with the fact that we expressed our vows in the presence of God, and that I felt our marriage to be blessed, from the very beginning, by the one who created us. I recall feeling as if our marriage was infused with light, God's blessing, as I understood it at the time. If God has, indeed, blessed our marriage, then when our marriage hits a rough patch, it becomes particularly important to commit to riding the waves, holding onto our conviction that this storm, like all others, will pass, and serenity and calm, as always, is bound to return. That is the beauty of a marriage that traverses a plenitude of time. You know you'll get through this rough patch. You always have before. This time will be no different. The person to whom you are united has demonstrated the same staying power, the same trustworthiness.

My parents did not have a perfect marriage. Yet they stayed together through more than 50 years. They rode the waves, they remained faithful, and they forgave each other time and time and time again. I remember as a child occasionally wondering if my mother really loved my father. She would be the first to say that patience was not her strong point, and my father and his many quirks often gave rise to my mother's impatience.

If ever I had a doubt about the deep and abiding love my mother held for my father, it was completely dispelled in the latter years of their lives. Dad was stricken with Alzheimers' some 18 or 19 years ago, and rapidly went downhill. Within a few short years, my mother painfully admitted that she could no longer care for him. He was admitted into a nursing home where he lived for more than a decade before passing away two years ago. For my mother, the grief of witnessing my father's rapid mental deterioration was second only to the grief of his passing. The comfort she had received in her marriage to my father was now, seemingly, inaccessible. Rarely now could he convey his love to her, and he could no longer share the burden of her many cares. When he passed away, she could not reconcile herself to the emptiness she felt.

My father's love for Mom was a constant source of nourishment to my mother, so constant, she probably took it for granted at times: it was always there, like the sun. Many times in the last year or so of her life she would tell me that never in her life had she known another love like this. I knew, by the extent of her grief, that she would soon follow him, so it was not a great surprise when, less than a year later, she received the diagnosis of terminal liver cancer. Dad was waiting for her, and Mom was packing her bags.

When I think of my marriage with Brian, I tend not to summon up images of romantic candle-lit dinners, passionate weekends at some hideaway, sentimental greeting cards... The stuff that makes us solid is not of this sort. What makes us solid is the ability to look back over the passage of 23 years, and take stock of the many, many challenges and triumphs we have faced together, the growth we have both experienced as individuals, and the history we have created, together with our children. It's the realization that through all of this, we have become stronger and more in sync. It's understanding more completely that this marriage of ours is indeed a "fortress of well-being" for ourselves, for our children, for all who are dear to us. Each brick of this fortress represents yet another time that we chose commitment to our marriage. Thank you, Brian for continuing to build this fortress with me.