On my Parents’ Anniversary

May 20. My Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary is coming up this Wednesday and turning my mind toward thoughts of love and life. Because upon my death no one will be left to recall the date that was supremely important to them.

Of course, this also puts reflections about my own marriage before me. 

My parents were together for almost thirty years, until his death at the age of fifty-one. Growing up, I witnessed some of the emotional and physical trauma of their relationship.

My marriage was also not spared times of doubt, discontent, and outright resentment. But we muddled on, as many intimate relationships do. In our case, for fifty years, to renew our marital vows at my wife’s deathbed.

Writer Simone de Beauvoir is credited with asking a question whispered to this day in the bedrooms of a million marriages:

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

Jo Anne was nineteen when we met, both of us students at Fordham. And, for 

better or worse, she found herself involved with me for life. 

Reflecting on our half-century of both ecstasy and turmoil, I need to ask myself this question: would she fall in love with me if she met me for the first time today?

I’m hoping the answer would be yes because although my body is far from the fresh young man’s of my youth, I think my soul has grown into something she would find more appealing today than when we first locked eyes at Fordham University decades ago.

Our ambition as spiritual men and women should be to grow our soul even as our body moves into decline.

The truly miraculous thing about us humans is that we continue to age, but we never stop growing – right up to the end, when our bodies give way to utter exhaustion.

Many of us are of the opinion that it’s precisely when our body dies that our soul blossoms.

This is the thought that led me to write my poem “Always,” which appears in the current issue of Peregrine: 

Pray always

to be mindful of the one who maintains us

Feel hungry always

to honor those who have little food

Study always

to learn to be human

Create always

for we are the image of a creator

Be grateful always 

because each thing is a gift

Love all

always

The tasks I identified in this poem – to be attentive, to honor others, to create – are the things that make us participants if not shapers of our own lives.

To quote the closing lines of poet Mary Oliver’s breath-taking poem, “When Death Comes:”

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad. You did well – and good.