Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

In the past two years I have had two students whose fathers were dying, and I watched (via regular email updates and occasional meetings) as their mothers dealt with caring for their dying husbands who they both clearly loved. And in those two years, while they battled for their husbands, I battled against my husband. While there was clearly an element of life’s implicit unfairness in my thoughts, there was also envy at the power of their love for their husbands. Small, that’s how I felt in their presence, and in the knowledge of how they had risen to the challenge.

I know this isn’t fair to me on some basic levels since I tried hard to make the marriage work, but it did not, it did not because I stopped loving the man I thought I would love forever. This isn’t the place to go into his behavior, or even mine, I just feel compelled to acknowledge those women and think for a bit about how their love became the center of their lives. While we often say that our children are the center of our lives, and that surely is from an eternally deep love, it is different than how you love a spouse who you selected to come into your life and who you expect to be with you until you leave this life (there’s no empty nest in marriages) and who truly is the center of your life. This is not a bird you are raising for flight, this is your nest mate.

I had always perceived myself as the type of person who would do anything for someone I loved, but watching their commitment put those thoughts to shame. Perhaps this has been an experience that I needed to go through to eventually become the kind of person I had thought I was—and who I would like to be. Maybe the key lesson has still to be learned, but the humbling experience is one that I needed to prepare me, to prepare me for that lesson and the life that is ahead of me.

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Postscript: The father of one of the student's died right before the next school year began; I have not heard any thing about the other father, I hope he is beating his disease.

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