I love what my parents made of their marriage, which lasted 63 years.
By the time the love story of Clifton and Minnie Spires ended on Jan. 15, 1999 --- that's the day Dad died of pneumonia in a hospital bed in Gallipolis, Ohio, they had outlived many of their contemporaries and were inspirations to many younger generations as individuals and as a couple who succeeded in combining their lives.
My sister, who has been married four times (once divorced, twice widowed) and I (thrice coupled, twice divorced) will never know what it is like to sleep and wake up with the same person for more than six decades, but at present we are both hopeful that at the end, it will be our spouses who are there for us.
Ultimately, of course, we wake up with and die by ourselves. Dad technically died alone in his hospital bed and was found by nurses. About a year and a half later, Mother was in an assisted-care center, where she was found on the floor in her room --- her mighty soul simply stepped out of her frail body and left it behind. Their deaths remind me of a line from Billy Joel's "My Life:"
They will tell you, you can't sleep alone in a strange place
Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else
Oh, but sooner or later ,you sleep in your own space
Either way, it's OK, you wake up with yourself
People wake up alone, even with a warm body beside them. And they die the same way, despite what Hollywood would have us believe about Merle Oberon going cold and limp in Laurence Olivier's arms or Ali MacGraw saying one last goodbye to Ryan O'Neal. We just stop and whatever happens next to what's inside of us is the next great mystery to discover.
Life can be a lonely journey, and it helps if someone is there along the way. In my case, I spent half a century looking for the one person who could make me feel like I have a little bit of what my parents had, and I believe I've found him. As I've said on countless occasions, I don't believe Robert and I need to go through a church ceremony for a benediction on our relationship --- every day we wake up in each other's arms, we know God is blessing us.
Robert, an English professor, and I, with my increasing involvement in gay civil rights organizations and issues, find ourselves often surrounded by "young people" --- which, to us, is anyone younger than us. When these folks compliment our relationship --- often by speaking of us as a two-person unit or by treating it like any heterosexual couple's --- I realize that I am starting to achieve what my parents had together: Knowledge of what it is like to love and be loved on a 24/7 basis. It is deep and complex and rich and unique in its layers and emotions, and yet very commonplace and mundane. When something is right, it becomes extraordinary and ordinary at the same time. A good marriage is something that just IS and one day you wake up and find that you've accomplished one of the great achievements in life, simply by rolling over and touching the person who is snoring peacefully next to you.
My mother wanted Dad to die in his own bed, and she tried to keep that promise to him until the very end. But with her own health declining, and him succumbing to the after-effects of heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer's, she finally had to give in to her children's selfishness: "Please put him in a nursing home and hold on for a little while longer by yourself --- we can handle losing one of you, but not both at the same time."
And so, Dad was hospitalized for a week while Sis and I drove Mother around in search of a place where he could be cared for while he died. It proved to be unnecessary: Dad's time to move on came while he was in the hospital.
Alzheimer's Disease gallops through my family's medical history --- my father and all five of his siblings developed it; for their aging children, family reunions are a time to study the behavior of first cousins and siblings and wonder, "Is he or she going to be the next one to get it? Because the odds are 50-50 that I could get it, I worry about being a burden to Robert, who is three years younger than me, and my younger son, who already has gone through the experience of having to be a caregiver for his own mother.
On a purely selfish level, I worry about dying alone --- which I understand I will do anyway, even if Robert is there holding my hand. When my time comes, I, like everyone else, will do what I have to do to take the next eternal step, but it would be nice if I could have a loved one --- particularly the man I regard as my husband --- next to me.
Although I feel the world is changing in favor of accepting same-sex relationships as legitimate, I am aware that, in America, at least, there are no guarantees that Robert and I will be allowed to be at each other's sides should we be hospitalized. I trust and want him to be the one who makes decisions, in my inability to do so, about my health care and, when the times comes, termination of life. And, if it is possible, I would like him to be holding my hand (I just can't see him carrying me to the window and staring out at the moors like Heathcliff and Cathy in "Wuthering Heights"), just as my parents would have preferred to be together when Dad moved on.
But the way America's laws are set up, there are no guarantees, from state to state, city to city, hospital to hospital, that we, as a same-sex couple, can be together. And so, we and other couples like us, have to pre-plan everything. There's no guarantee that when the time comes, we will be granted the right to say goodbye one last time.
Robert and I don't have enough years left to match my parents' record of successful marriage. But we want the quality of our lives together to be similar to theirs, lived in an extraordinary peace that allows us to be together until the very end. And that peace has to include the peace of mind of knowing that no arbitrary and unfair outside forces will conspire to separate us --- if we die alone, it will be God's purpose, not man's. But if we are able to be together at one or the other's departure from the world, it will simply be a continued blessing.
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