A Marriage But Not a Lifetime ...

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of heaven dance between you.

Khalil Gibran on Marriage, The Prophet

My Mom and Dad--Sam and Henry

The night or early morning that my father died, I was the first one back to his hospice room. I had been the last one to leave his bedside a few hours earlier and thought how strange it was to be in the same room my Mom had died two years before, not the same bed, but placed in the same place she had been in that hospice space. And just like my mother, he looked peaceful.
   Back then, when my mother was dying, my father came (actually he sneaked in) to see my mother and he told her how pretty she was. She was. She had been pretty all her life, but she didn't know it. She had no vanity where her looks were concerned even though I never remember my father commenting on her beauty before. It made her day. She asked my sister if it was true. Was she pretty? Yeah, she was, my sister told her and remarked later how much it meant to our mother. It made a difference still what my father thought. My mother had loved him most of her life. In the end, it mattered what he thought and said.
     Still, as I sat next to his bed waiting for the coroner and my sisters to come, I sat at my computer and wrote his story. He was the son of a preacher man, a preacher himself. He was an educator, a mathematician extraordinaire. A flirt, he could charm the skin off a snake's back and teaching was his greatest joy. What I couldn't write and it wasn't necessary at the time, was how much I wanted to love him and wanted him to love me. Some of that I managed to get in the end, but only when his mind was slowed by dementia and age. I couldn't fight with him because it wouldn't have been a fair fight, but sometimes I wanted to. I wanted to have it out with him, but time was not on either of our sides.
     But, here's what I wondered. My mother and father had been divorced 34 years when she died. But there was something there. Perhaps, over time, I'll be able to put it all together. That is the reason for this blog. A lot of time we try and figure out the past so that we go on with our lives, resolve something, fix something. It isn't like that with me on this blog. I want to write their story because I believe it was a love story of a great magnitude. This is not to take away from the other women my father married (we know of at least 4 or 5, but maybe 8?). We know my mother was Wife 4, but I don't want to give too much away, too soon.
     No, I don't want to write a story to wrap up anything, but to honor something that was there even though it was often hidden in the pains and sorrows that go with life. I felt then as I do now, that my mother came to get my father that night because it was time. And I will say from the onset, I'm proud to be the daughter of Savantha Lee Walthall and Henry William McCary. I have the best of both of them in me. For me, this is their story and I'm hoping that as they are basking in that silent memory of God, that they like the story I tell, even it is only from my dreams.