50 Years...100 Years...500 Years

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Today was supposed to be my parents 50th wedding anniversary. Three weeks short. On the night when Dad died, Mom turned to me and said, "We didn't make it."

How's that for heartbreaking?

Yet, of course they made it. They set up a love that will span way more than 50 years, way more than 100. As I told her, it was a love that will last about 500 years.

And that is a remarkable story in this day and age.

In a time when marriages are treated as somewhat disposable, they endured. And for sure, there were moments when it was all about endurance. As a child I would remember arguments and fights that could rattle the walls from time-to-time. Two very intense people battling under the immense pressure of having to put up with six little Fuzzy creations.

Still, they hung in there.

And taught us what needed to be learned. It wasn't always teaching in the most conventional of ways, but learn we did.

Over the last severeal years we took to comparing Mom and Dad to the parents of George Costanza in the Seinfeld Show. Back and forth they would go, battling through mundane tasks in a now quiet house.

Over the last couple of months they drew even closer as Dad took Mom for radiation treatments and they stopped at different places for lunch.

I can't imagine the pain in my mother's heart today and it shatters my heart to even consider it.

"He made me so friggin' mad sometimes," Mom said to me just the other day. "But he was such a good man."

Amen.

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad.

50 down. 450 to go.

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