Grant that we may grow old together

Last updated on: July 17, 2017 at 7:00 am by Vance Morgan

Grant that we may grow old together 2017-07-15T09:17:43-04:00 Vance Morgan

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Today is Jeanne’s and my twenty-ninth anniversary! We celebrated it two days ago in Boston by first visiting the New England Aquarium (something that Jeanne’s always wanted to do, with lots of penguins for me),

penguins 2

then by going to a craft beer festival (something I’d be happy to do every day of the week). The year since last July has been eventful–my new book was published, Jeanne landed a full-time job after too long without one, we lost one of three-pack of dogs, another one of the dogs is beginning to rack up bills at the vet . . . life has been happening, in other words.

During my five years of blogging, I’ve made a point of writing about our years together on our anniversary, on Valentine’s Day, and on Jeanne’s birthday. I should do it more often, since these are some of the most “liked” and commented on posts I’ve written (always looking for the numbers!). In these posts, I’ve included some insights from my favorite authors, including this one from Anne Lamott:

Union with a partner–someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely.

I’m not sure that anyone would list this on a dating site as their vision of a great relationship, but those who have been around the block a number of times know that it’s the best thing ever. When I first read this passage in Small Victories, I that “that sounds like Jeanne and me!” And you’re right, Anne–it is lovely.

I also appreciate this passage toward the end of Rachel Kadish’s Tolstoy Lied, as the main character reflects on what she has learned about love.

Love–real love–is not cinematic. It’s the stuff no one talks about: How trust grows rootlets. How two people who start as lovers become custodians of each other’s well-being.

We have a quiet, normal life of the sort that those who only know the extroverted side of Jeanne would find hard to believe. Only those who lived through it would know how many life experiences, many of them challenging and difficult, have brought us to this very welcome place of peace and quiet happiness. Ours is not the sort of love story that people write novels or make movies about—there’s too much of the everyday and too little blockbuster drama to hold a viewer’s attention. But that’s something to be embraced. As our friend Marsue remarked the other evening, “normal is good.”

Human love in the purest forms we can know it, wife and husband, parent and child, has the aura and the immutability of the sacred.

This passage from one of Marilynne Robinson’s essays is profoundly true. Jeanne and I could not be more different by nature, even though we have modified each other’s extremes a bit over the years. But one thing we have always shared is a deep desire to know God. The paths this desire has led us down are not the same; sometimes they aren’t even similar. But we both recognize the divine when we bump into it, and I have learned more about God’s love, acceptance, joy, and presence from close to thirty years together with Jeanne (we did live together for a while before we were married–gasp!) than religion could ever have taught me. I’ve learned not to be surprised when the day-to-day and the sacred turn out to be the same thing. Life with Jeanne has taught me that.

For years Jeanne and I have had a good-natured disagreement about which of us is going to die first—neither of us wants to outlast the other. I can’t imagine life without the person with whom I have for better and for worse spent almost half of my years. My anniversary wish is what the author of the Book of Tobit asks: Mercifully grant that we may grow old together.

The lovely couple 3

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