Yesterday afternoon, as I was having my blood drawn prior to seeing my oncologist, I mentioned to the technician that my husband and I had recently celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary. In her musical Cayman Islands accent, she asked me if I thought I’d live until my fiftieth. The question rocked me, especially in that setting, since personnel at the cancer center have been uniformly optimistic. I mumbled something like “I hope so.”
I take to heart comments and questions about cancer and mortality these days, since these issues are no longer theoretical for me. Occasionally I’m blindsided by one that sends me spiraling into depression, but most of the time I try to put them behind me. As I gradually learn how to live in the present, they’ve become less painful; their sting doesn’t last as long. They’re like those little stones thrown up by truck wheels that ping off your windshield. Fortunately, most of them bounce away without causing any damage.
As insensitive as her question seemed, I suspect it was benign, for she then launched into a long description of a fiftieth anniversary celebration she’d recently attended in which the couple had renewed their vows. “They dressed up in wedding clothes and acted like they were still sixteen,” she said. She’d clearly enjoyed the event and apparently found it meaningful enough to advise me to think about it for our fiftieth.
I know wedding vow renewal ceremonies have become popular in recent years, but so far I fail to see their attraction. It seems to me that the point of wedding vows is that you give them once, with the intention that you will keep them throughout your lifetime. I have the sense that renewing them oddly undermines the original vows. Certainly, forty or fifty years into a marriage, a couple can make their vows with a deeper, more mature understanding of what the words signify. But isn’t part of the mystery of marriage exactly that “not-knowing,” that blind leap into a future you can’t see? That naive tumble into adventure?
I was appallingly naïve when I made my wedding promises forty years ago. I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, a child of the idealistic sixties who was caught up that era’s romantic optimism. Like most girls, I was raised on Cinderella, happily-ever-after stories.
I remember very little of the specifics of our wedding ceremony. But I do know that the words “’till death do us part” rocked me at the time, with their gravitas and intimations of mortality. They rock me still. That my husband and I have vowed to stay together until death parts us means that our story, ultimately, will not have a happy ending.
All of which suggests that the story is not actually about the ending, but about the middle – the day to day living of it. Marriage seems to be as much a mysterious advenutre as life itself.
What I’m cultivating now is a different kind of optimism than I had forty years ago. A practiced optimism , an optimism that is not subject to the whims of fortune, but focused on waking up each day, grateful that I’m alive. Focused on being truly alive throughout the day.
Will I live to see my fiftieth wedding anniversary? I sincerely hope so. But right now I’m going to celebrate this day.
Today I’m awake. I’m alive. Praise God.
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