Memo On a Marriage

By TAD BARTIMUS and her husband, Dean Wariner

Memo to Tad,

I know we agreed to write memos to each other about what it means to be married for 24 years -- something like 24 reasons why our marriage works. Then, yesterday, I drove you to have surgery on a tooth that had been giving you trouble. Afterward, as we were driving home, you said: "I have to go to the emergency room now, because I'm going to faint."

That changed what was otherwise a pretty routine day. I even held your wrist to check your pulse while I drove to the hospital. I don't know what I would have done if your pulse had disappeared.

As with a lot of unknown dreads, I don't think about those things unless forced. At the emergency room, it dawned on me that not facing those concerns could be a problem. I felt the adrenaline one swallows when fear sets in. You had taken a pain pill, but you had already been anesthetized from the oral surgery and your body reacted to it. As the nurse and doctor worked with you, I watched, feeling helpless and frightened.

As your body began to right itself and the effects of shock wore off, you regained composure and began to feel better; you wanted to go home without further fussing. I knew then that marriage cannot be summed up in 24 neatly packaged homilies any more than a story can be told or a life lived in a few moments.

Watching you try to regain your balance these past few hours, I thought about how, as the years have rolled by, I have accepted an uneasy truce with fate. I've always secretly worried about getting that phone call, about sending you away on business and then coming home to find that things are not OK with your health. Before very many years had passed by in our marriage, we'd experienced too many accidents and illnesses that could have turned out far worse.

As novelist Ernest K. Gann wrote, you become a hostage to fortune over those you love. Your fear runs a low-grade fever over the prospect of bad news coming to find you.

So, if I haven't come up with 24 good reasons to be married to you, Tad, what have I decided upon? For starters, I remembered the words of the Rev. Henry Kahula, who married us in the missionary church down the road. In the ceremony, he said that marriage is a journey over peaks and through valleys, and that we have to weather all sorts of discomforts before that journey is complete. He said that as long as we love each other enough, we will have the strength and desire to see through any of the difficulties that befall us.

Many of our misadventures, and even some of our most memorable fights, have become fodder for family jokes and sayings and are enough to keep us entertained for quite a few evenings. After a while, you begin to wear your marriage like a baggy old sweatshirt, one that you cannot bear to part with every time spring cleaning rears its ugly head. And no, I did not call you a baggy sweatshirt.

What I'm saying is that there is no neat way to talk about our romance, just as there is no neat way to live our marriage. It's a messy, uncertain business that requires our daily attention and prayers. The more we put into it, the more we get out of it. So, on this anniversary I want to let you know that I love you with all my heart. I will do my best to remember that is why I hang around to interrupt your day. And I promise to always drive you to the emergency room with my fingers on your pulse.

Love, Dean

Memo to Dean,

Lose the old baggy sweatshirt simile, otherwise the memo is a keeper, and so are you.

Happy 24th anniversary.

With love from your woozy wife, Tad

© 2002 The Women Syndicate

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