The Way We Were/The Way We Are

1.

Today is our 45^th wedding anniversary. Last August 5^th was the 50^th anniversary of the day we met. There were five years, seven months, and six days between the day we met and the day we married. A lot of things happened during that elapsed time, but the most important thing happened at the very beginning: I knew we would marry the day I met Frank. I knew right after he kissed me for the first time, on the first landing of the stairway down to the Fifth Avenue station of the 7 train on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 42^nd Street. When I got home, I told my mom I had met the man I was going to marry.

“You’re always meeting the man you’re going to marry,” she said.

“No, Mom, this is THE ONE. I know,” said I.

The second most important thing that happened to us, and only time I ever doubted what I knew in my heart and blood and bone, was when I ran into Frank and his first wife in the Main Street station of the 7 train, about a year and a half after we broke up.

I hadn’t seen him at all during that time, though I had called him at work many times during that first summer, just to keep myself a presence in his head and heart. When I saw him standing there, alone, by the token booth, it was just like in the movies—everything in my peripheral vision disappeared, and all I saw was HIM. I ran right up to him and threw my arms around his neck, and started babbling about how wonderful it was to see him, and did he have time to grab a cup of coffee or a drink somewhere? I’d LOVE to catch up.

A woman approached him but I didn’t really see her until he said:
“Claudia, this is my wife.”

“Oh,” I said.

They were in a hurry to go somewhere, and like a fool, I let them get away. But just for a minute or two … while I was on the stairway up to the street, I said to myself, “WIFE?? WIFE?????” and went back down, through the turnstile, found them in the train, and sat across from them.

“So, how long have you been married?”

“About a year,” said he. She said nothing. She just looked very unhappy.

I don’t remember anything else about the conversation. I got off at my stop, which was only three stops after we got on, so about five minutes total elapsed time. When I got home, only my sister Nancy was there, and I sobbed out everything that had just happened.

At some point, I told my parents and the rest of my sibs and forbade everyone from ever mentioning Frank’s name to me again. I did not understand how he could have married someone else less than six months after we broke up. He had asked me to move in with him; I said no, because if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be able to go home again, because my folks would have disowned me. I would have no place to live and no way to pay for school (I was in my second year at Parsons School of Design). Also, my plan was to live on my own and support myself with freelance illustration, in between graduating and eventually marrying. I didn’t want to go from my parents’ home to my husband’s home. I wanted to stand on my own two feet, to see if I could. I wanted to use my talent to support myself.
But six months after I said “No” to him (and I guessed he heard “No, never” when what I meant was “No, not now”), he marries someone else?
My heart was broken, as only a nineteen-year-old girl’s heart can be, when she has forever lost the man she was going to marry.

The third most important thing was when we got back together. In retrospect, this may actually be THE most important thing, but we couldn’t get back together if we hadn’t (1) met and (2) broken up, so that’s why it’s number 3.

A little more than a year later, I was sitting at my drawing board in my studio apartment on East 28^th Street in Manhattan, into which I had moved the previous March, working on a freelance illustration job that wasn’t going particularly well. It was about 5 in the afternoon, and my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Claudia. This is Frank.”

“What the fuck do YOU want?”

“I want to apologize for hurting you.”

“I’m listening…”

Five hours later, we were done talking for the night.

But really, we have never stopped talking at all.

So, a year and half after that conversation, we got married at St. Demetrios Church in Astoria, the same church where my parents had been married twenty-four years, ten months, and twenty-seven days before. My sister Nancy was my maid of honor.
Frank’s divorce was finalized just six weeks earlier, after a year’s legal separation, and we still didn’t have the papers, but we were married.
As I always knew we would be.

2.

The ensuing forty-five years have been with filled with love, with tears (of joy and of grief), with happy times, with terrifying times, with infrequent fights (though some were pretty intense), and with not one night where we didn’t end the day saying “I love you.”

We’ve been through career changes (some voluntary, others by necessity), job losses, financial disasters, cancer scares (but not cancer), one years-long period of disability for Frank that resolved, and one which hasn’t (and is ongoing), the deaths of three out of four parents (both of mine, and his dad, five weeks after my mom passed). His mother is ninety-six now, and my greatest fear for her is that she will outlive us. It’s a possibility since she is the only one of the three of us that doesn’t have to concern herself with anything at all, so her life is stress-free and her physical health is good. Her memory is spotty at best, though she still knows who I am, but she never remembers to ask after Frank, her only child. I stop by her place to care for her two days a week, to give her blessed HHA a well-deserved break. I care for Frank every day, and have for the last three and a half years.

Six months before COVID hit, Frank became homebound, after progressively losing his mobility over a period of about a year. It was a recurrence of the neuropathies that had cost him most of his forties, but from which he had very slowly recovered. It’s harder to recover from such things in your seventies, harder still when you fall using your walker and end up living in your bedroom, only able to take a few walker-dependent steps from bed to desk chair to commode and back. He fell during a transfer from chair to bed last October, and I had to ask our super to help get him back up off the floor because I couldn’t do it. The first time he fell, in October 2021, he fell three times over the space of two hours, his right leg going out from under him, despite the walker. I was able to get him righted each time, but that was when his confinement to the bedroom began.

When you live through something like this, as a caregiver to the person you love most in the world, something funny happens with time, and with memory. You are living in the moment all the time, even in your sleep. You are always on alert for your beloved calling your name, for an odd thump, for the sound of the bedroom lamp being turned on, for the light in the hallway. Living on constant alert puts your past at the wrong end of a telescope. It is untouchable, unreachable, and your life in the Before Time takes on the character of being a movie you saw a long, long time ago. It feels like someone else’s life.

Something else that changes is intimacy. Caregiving is physically very intimate, but it is not romantic. It is a different kind of closeness, in that it is physically necessary for the health and well-being of the person being cared for. The person being cared for is vulnerable and open—physically, emotionally, spiritually—to the caregiver. The caregiver’s loving ministrations are essential in every sense of the word. For someone who needs to be needed, like me, it is natural and good and a way to show love, but it is a different form of physical love with different emotional overtones.

I am often emotionally and physically exhausted; not every day, but often enough. I’m not just caring for Frank; I’m handling all of his mother’s affairs as well. I resent that she is mobile at her age, and he is not. Sometimes my fury is so great, I feel my entire body vibrating from the inside out. I talk to myself out loud, because sometimes I am the only person who really listens to me. Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will understand when I say I feel like Beverly Crusher in the shrinking Enterprise, except there’s no Wesley and no Traveler to bring me back into the real world/the Before Time. The episode is called Remember Me. That seems to be a little too close to home sometimes. And yet…

I had a dream where my father told me he was proud of me for doing what I am trying so hard to do. In real life, he would have been. When my mother’s health was failing, he would carry her on his back down the stairs of their home. He would understand me and why I do what I do. The nuns who taught me at Our Lady of Sorrows would be satisfied that I took their lessons on the corporal works of mercy to heart.

One of the regrets I have is that I didn’t really take time for myself when I was younger. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so cheated out of my retirement had I taken time off back then. I once went for 22 years (1988-2010) without going away on a vacation. We went to Washington, DC in 1988 for our 10^th wedding anniversary, and had a wonderful time; we went to Greenport, Long Island in late 2010 because I wanted to go all the way out east to mourn my father after his death earlier that year. Our last vacation together was in 2014.
I was never good at vacation, I guess. Too late now.

One real advantage of the life I am living now is that weight loss is effortless because I never stop moving. I’ve lost almost 80 pounds in the last three years, about one-third of my body weight. While it has won me many compliments, I cannot recommend this weight loss program to anyone else.

The emotional and spiritual toll of this has been heavy for both of us. It’s hard for Frank to see me so tired. It’s hard for me to be so tired. It has caused me to doubt the existence of God. I follow the commandments because they make sense to me. I take Jesus’ words very much to heart, because he outlines a good way to live among others, God or no God.  I am still a deeply spiritual person, because I feel trying to do good in the world is a better way to live. But my doubt, which is fairly recent, troubles me. If all there is at the end of life is death, what does life mean? I don’t know. But I will keep bringing fresh flowers into the bedroom for Frank, and I will keep his favorite ice cream stocked in the freezer, because they are little kindnesses that make his world better, and his world is even smaller than mine, so it counts more.

It’s not all pain and woe; we still laugh every day, we enjoy the meals I make, we watch good movies and series. We love watching the bears at Katmai National Park. We’ve become fans and then supporters of the Orphaned Wildlife Center (starring a troop of rescued Syrian bears). We sent them twenty-two pounds of honey for Christmas because we enjoy them so much. What I try to do is live minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. When someone who hasn’t seen me for awhile asks me how I am, I say “Today is a good day” or I tell the truth if it’s been rough.

The way we were is not the way we are. All I can do, all we can do, all anyone can do, is keep putting one foot in front of the other, and hope for the best.

Happy anniversary to us. Forty-five years, still together, still trying our best, still saying “I love you” before going to sleep.
And I do. I love him, and always will.

Today is a good day.

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