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A PRAYER FOR COUPLES
WHO HAVE IT TOGETHER
A Widow Bit – March 14, 2008
By Mary Koch

Certain tourists begin to appear at this time of year, two by two, like robins signaling the imminent, warmer seasons.

AARP-aged couples, they stroll down Main Street at a leisurely pace, perhaps having parked their RV around the corner. They browse shop windows, looking for nothing in particular—plenty of time and (our tourism industry hopes) money on their hands. Our town is probably a wayside stop along a route that will take them from one place to somewhere.

They walk in tandem. I’ve seen a rare few hold hands, but it’s their synchronized movement that tells you they’ve been a couple for a long time. They are as coordinated as a figure-skating pair, but not because they’ve consciously practiced. When two people walk, not necessarily touching but as if they’re joined at the hip, you know it’s because they’ve shared many miles along life’s journey.

I began to notice these couples after my husband’s stroke. I had to put aside envy, because they represented what might have been. We too might have eventually retired and gone exploring.

I would think about times we did travel, before the stroke. One of the delicious parts of being a couple in a new place is that you know only each other; everyone else is a stranger. Being alone together in an alien surrounding binds you ever more tightly.

As I watched the tourists, I would feel the yearning of remembrance. Corny, but a song from the “King and I” inevitably came to mind, revised to fit my circumstances: “Hello, old lovers, whoever you are. I hope your troubles are few. I have a love of my own unlike yours; I have a love of my own.”

The stroke put John and me on a different kind of journey. We remained a couple. Oh my, yes. But the choreography was different, with one in a wheelchair and the other on two legs.

The longer you are with a mate, the less you identify as an individual. You are part of a couple. You use collective pronouns: “Our home … we went … it happened to us …”

I find myself still using “us,” “we” and “our.” The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and when one of the parts is gone, we lose not only that part, but the “whole.”

In a wedding scene in his novel “A Widow for One Year,” John Irving borrows a rhetorical question from George Eliot. I wish I’d read it long ago, but now it provides context for my memories:

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”

Or simply to stroll tourist-like along a dusty, small town main street, a couple of lovers, wholly together.

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