We are to that season where we wonder how our love story is going to end.
We have declared many times that we are going together because neither one of us could make it without the other. Our lives and hearts and woven together sweetly and beautifully like a quilt of stories. Our favorite time of the day, we agree, is as we fall asleep together. It is gentle and comforting. Sometimes, as she drifts off into sleep, will say, “Do you know what I am thinking about? Coffee in the morning.”
We sleep all tangled up in each other’s arms and legs. We roll over together. When I wake up I feel like I have been connected to a gentle battery charger all night and my heart is filled up to the top.
We have long easy intimate conversations every morning over several cups of home-roasted coffee.
In the summer mornings we sit on the patio in wrought iron rockers and watch the yellow finches on the feeder and soak up the pink, lavender, red, and yellow colors and tall green flowing grasses in the flower garden. That is when we work on our mission statement: coffee and pondering.
We have always had interesting things to talk about ever since we met in 1977.
We share the Core Emotions Wheel from the Connection Codes in the early morning hours and whenever we simply need to process something going on about life.
We are being trained to become Communications Codes Coaches, growing together and increasing our capability and competence to help couples and individuals to have better lives. Helping people as a couple has been our story for a sweet long time.
We have had some conversations about whether we are enmeshed and or co-dependent.
We are not sure. However, we do know that we love the way that our lives have grown into each other’s and how much we still enjoy our meaningful and usually playful interactions after 46 years of marriage. We sometimes have couple skirmishes, like most married folks. And we have learned how to skillfully untangle the knot when it happens. Sure, we have the ebb and flow of married life, but we are experiencing more flow these days. Yesterday I went into the ministry listening room to read for a while. (Ministry room when people come to see us and listening room when we are having conversations with each other or with friends.) Afterwards she said that she was lonely and missed me while I was reading. I like being missed…
Someday, not any time real soon, we will get to the point where we will know that every word of our couple story has been written. We definitely have so much more to say and do together here. But when the day comes when we don’t, we will simply lay down in our bed together, hold hands, and tell God that we are ready to come home. Next we will meet Jesus face to face with our hands entwined.
It’s much easier to declare that story than to ever think about living alone.
The going together narrative is well within the scope and kindness of God.
We’re going out hand in hand.
Yesterday sweet baby asked me if I would stay in our current home if she went first.
I said it would be hard to imagine living anywhere else because this house has such meaning and is such a perfectly splendid home.
It was a God gift to us in 2020 after 12 years of renting. It is beautiful. The garden is stunning. The back yard and patio is inviting. Multiple guest rooms. So many good things have happened in this home.
Then I thought about being alone in this house.
I shared with her about:
How I would miss her every place that I sat.
I would sit in my recliner and see her in hers.
I would sit in the listening room ministry room and see her in her white swivel chair where we helped couples together and had our morning coffee.
I would sit on the back patio and see her weeding the garden and playing in the dirt with such carefree joy.
We both cried tears of sadness. The imagined loneliness rinsed over us.
The tears felt a lot different than my usual tears of joy or tears related to deep feelings.
These tears were saltier in my sinuses and reminded me of when I was a child and I would cry after being punished. When I was seven I felt very alone, unloved and unlovable.
These were definitely not tears of joy and positive emotion.
There was a rare and tangible sadness in my tears this morning.
The feelings of those tears connected me back to feeling alone as a child.
Yes, we shall go together.
That’s what the last page of our marriage book will say.
“They went off into eternity holding hands and all tangled up in each other.”
October 13, 2024