Bo and Steve Stern

I have mentioned this couple before in my blogs. Bo has chronicled their experience of ALS/MND in her own blog. Yesterday's was especially moving for me, because I find it so easy to transpose Jane for Bo. My form of MND is not the same as Steve's, not so rapid, but the "muscle" in our marriage is very much Jane's. Here is Bo's blog post, called A Letter to 1985 revisited - in our case the date would be 1974. Do follow the link to Steve's part of the story.

I can’t begin to describe this past week, but my husband has done a good job telling part of the story here. I’ve never known a season more emotionally demanding. After a sleepless night, turning decisions and memories over in my mind a million times, I finally came to this one conclusion: Life is harder than I ever dreamed it would be, but as beautiful as I’ll let it be. So, on this the 14th day of March, 2014, I declare to you that Life. Is. Beautiful. Here’s a post I wrote awhile back. I believe in it more now than ever: —————————————————– Dear Very, Very Young Bo, You are about to walk down the aisle and marry the love of your life. You will say vows that are made of fancy words like protect, honor and “troth” (pretend you know what it means). You will promise to love Steve. He will promise to love you. You will promise to take care of him. He will promise to take care of you. In your heart, you will feel love beyond all sense of reason and you will be ready to sacrifice anything for him. Anything. Then the laundry will pile up. And he will want to go golfing when you want to have a long talk about a subject that is only interesting to you. And that’s when you’ll start to build some bargains into your relationship and they will sound almost vow-like in their virtue. You will tell him he can go golfing on Saturday if he will also clean the garage on Friday. You’ll agree to fold his underwear if he agrees to wash your car. You’ll make deals and he’ll make deals and before you know it, you’ll be living in a world that is fair-and-square and even-steven. You’ll learn to expect all the emotional ledgers to be balanced with exactly the right ratios of give-and-take. But eventually, your fear will get the best of you and you’ll have no courage to bring into…anything. Steve will find that all the chips have been moved to his side of the table as he works triple time to assure you that you are loved and safe. It will make him weary, but don’t even worry, he’ll handle it like the champ you only suspect he is now. He’ll love you fiercely and fight for your freedom and you will never feel for a moment that he regrets choosing you. Never for a moment. His love will help you find what you need to become brave like you’ve never imagined you could be. And that newfound courage? Hold onto it with both hands. Because, sister, the future you see as you peer through your wedding veil is going to take a turn you cannot possibly see coming. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The day will come when you will be all the muscle in this marriage and you should stop laughing now, because I’m not actually kidding (but the comedy of the situation is not lost on me.) A dark day will come when you will steady his shaking hand as you sit in a hospital waiting room. You will button his shirt and help him shave. You will do the driving and the lifting and the working…but he will still be brave enough for both of you. Not gonna lie: some moments you’ll feel like you’ll buckle beneath the weight, but you won’t and neither will he. Because it turns out the vows aren’t perfect and they aren’t even-steven, but they are strong and real. They’re as strong as you’re willing to live them and as strong as the God who heard you say them. One day you’ll see a young, healthy couple make their promises, dressed in white. You will think about how they have all their days ahead of them and your heart will do a little squeeze because you remember that very moment in your life when the future stretched out so wide. But here’s the thing: you won’t envy them. Because you’ll know what you have is proven and true. It’s made of long nights and hard fights and a lot of giving when it seemed there was nothing more to give. In a world that is more comfortable with quitting than sticking, you will discover that the truest joy is not found in the shallows, but out in the deep. So, go say your vows. Eat the cake. Love your life. You will never regret this choice. But you might regret that dress. With courage, Much Older Bo

 "Many waters cannot quench love,
    neither can floods drown it.
If a man offered for love
    all the wealth of his house,    
he would be utterly despised" (Song of Solomon 8.7)

Blessings and breast cancer

A friend of mine today put this on Facebook: "It's been a long hard week....but it's been a week where I've lost count of the blessings in my life......thank you, God, for each and every one of them!!..." 

On our neighbours' roof, too many starlings to count!

You'd better believe it when I say that her life is tough at the best of times. Her father has Alzheimers and she herself seems to have an as-yet undiagnosed condition like mine. He was rushed into hospital for a heart operation last weekend. The shock and disorientation for someone already confused cannot be imagined. Neither can be the distress for his loved ones. And yet she writes about losing count of her blessings this week!


It put me in mind of a remarkable article I read this week, Exquisite and Excruciating: The Life of Married Love. Before those of you who are single switch off, please don't, because it's a remarkable article in itself and says a lot about God's love and suffering. It begins like this:

"Like many survivors of breast cancer, I have some serious battle scars. My un-bandaged body after breast cancer certainly made for some interesting pillow talk between my husband and myself.

"Going into the crisis long ago, we barely considered what it would mean for our love. But when I was done with all the treatment, the question lingered unspoken in the air—what would our marriage look like? Stranger still, what would it feel like?

"I knew he loved me before all the surgeries. Fourteen happy years and three children assured me of that. But we had never really, really been tested by the experience of heartache, loss, and fear that a cancer diagnosis brings.

"In the aftermath, I could not begin to fathom what our intimate moments might be like, now that I had been surgically taken apart and permanently altered.

"My husband just smiled and kissed the boo-boos. And he never stopped.

"The miraculous healing power of lips to scars transformed the broken hearts and the marriage that cancer had tried to lay to waste, better than life-saving surgery ever could...." 

Marc Chagall, Wedding

Pat Cohn's article is as inspiring as it is beautifully written, and I recommend reading it all, because the truth is, as St Paul tells us, that married love is just a picture of Christ's love for the Church; that means you and me. I hope I'm not being irreverent if I say he wants to kiss our painful scars and heal our broken hearts.

You'll not be surprised that I picked this bit out too:

"Our marriage is a vowed life until death. We know one of us will get there first. We just don't know how or when.

"So when headlines shout to us about making physician-assisted suicide legal, or whether or not it is ethical for a "healthy" spouse to divorce a "sick" spouse because the illness has robbed the marriage of its protracted happiness, we know that we have to redouble our efforts to affirm life and love."

She ended her article like this: "This is the truth of laying one's life down for the sake of the friend, the spouse. It is how we, mere mortals, live Eucharistic lives: "This is my body, given up for you" (Lk. 22:19).

"Loving someone until death is as hard as it is beautiful. It will mean sacrifice. It will also be a well of deep, refreshing joy.

"You will have battle scars over time from the hardships that life throws at your marriage. But when we invite Christ into our marriage, he sends graces to heal every scar that our fingers can trace, as his love magnifies and lingers in every embrace."