Love in the Sacred Quiet
Bill laid in his hospital bed in post operative care, recovering from the lung needle biopsy performed the day before. The surgeon had already spoken to him and his kids about the findings — the findings of which were of little surprise to anyone. Mesothelioma, cancer of the mesothelium, the tissue that lines the lungs, stomach and heart among other organs, was growing in Bill’s left lung. After years in the military, working during the peak period of asbestos exposure for shipyard Navymen, Bill’s disease had likely been thirty years or more in the making. Within weeks, the disease took him from a relatively healthy state for an eighty-five year old man to his death bed, barely able to speak, eat or move.
Bill is my wife’s grandfather. He is also the father of my mother-in-law and the primary caregiver for her grandmother, who suffers from a number of ailments that have left her unable to walk or care for herself on a daily basis. Throughout the last year, as he’s dealt with the onset of pain from what we now know is lung cancer, the family has had to step in and provide help to get the couple through their day-to-day.
His diagnosis and rapid decline have left everyone in his orbit scrambling to create a plan for his care now, and his wife’s care once he’s gone. Predictably, this has been challenging — logistically, emotionally and financially. But my wife’s family has that rare quality you see sometimes in movies about big families — despite the business of life and the changes that accompany growing up — they all remain close. They celebrate everyone’s birthday individually, no matter how old you are, with a party and a cake. There is always a cake. They converge at her grandparents’ house, an implausibly small ranch style home in a farm community, to crowd around a four-person kitchen table and a 10x10 living room to eat food that is always freshly cooked on the stove and share each others’ lives. They do this on holidays, on birthdays, on Sundays, on regular days. They do this for no other reason than they are a family, and they genuinely want to be in each other’s company.
In the six years my wife and I have been together, I have never grown tired of eating a meal around that small table or being welcomed by her aunts and uncles, cousins (so many cousins) and grandparents at every holiday. They are warm but not fake, sarcastic and serial kidders but never mean or undercutting. They have felt like a family I belonged to from early on, never one I had to win over or convince. (Although some say my early compliments of her grandma’s stuffing and shared love of Seinfeld may have curried some favor.) Our son’s middle name is in honor to her grandfather, and I am grateful that he might have very early memories of his great grandparents, and their home, and the foundation of family that exists there.
My wife is a byproduct of this family, a tried and true representative of who they are as a whole. She is unfailingly loyal and holds a torch for the people in her life who are lucky enough to receive her love. She is the brand of person who lists “family” as an interest on a profile, and not because it’s a worthy characteristic to hold. She is a model of inclusion, ordering large quantities of food to make sure everyone is fed and then some, caring not about how much things cost or repayment for things owed, giving without marking it on a list to someday consult for payback.
Once Bill’s diagnosis was solidified, my wife worked diligently to hire a lawyer and file the necessary paperwork for VA benefits, along with any funds the family can claim from mesothelioma settlements created by companies who have admitted to poisoning workers across America for 50 years. She took calls at nights and on the weekends, she drove to their tiny farm community to meet with the aging VA representative in their district, who didn’t really believe in email.
She flew in a lawyer from New York to get a deposition on record before his health became too fragile. Like my wife, her mother and aunt are salt of the earth family people. Taking week-by-week shifts, time off of work and overnights with little sleep to ensure a family member is caring for her grandparents, they haven’t stopped since it began. Their actions, big and small in the every day, aren’t heroic measures. At least that’s not how they see it. They are acts of love among family. Acts of love in the sacred quiet space that exists when we need love the most.
Valentine’s Day is about love and I’ve written plenty about my wife and our marriage and love in general. But the moments of love that run the deepest are never written inside a card. They are rarely celebrated or talked about at all. The moments of love that leave you at the bedside of someone who is leaving this Earth, shoving aside your own grief to serve the needs of someone else whose grief is more — these are the moments of love I am thinking about today. The love inside a family I am privileged to be a part of, a family whose love I am lucky enough to witness firsthand.
Today I want to say I love you to my wife, yes, but also this:
I love who you are. I love that our son has such a person to call his mother and protector. I love that you keep choosing me, again and again. I love your family like they are my own, and I love that our kids will grow up surrounded by the same love and food and birthday cake every year that you grew up with. I love that they might turn out just like you.
Love in the moments of our lives that can’t exist inside a card are the most sacred. Today I am going to honor that.
