Since the passing of my mother in October of 2008, I have been searching for something. A piece of understanding about the relationship of two people being married for nearly 60 years. It is not a burden upon my spirit but a yearning to know what it means.
In the search for that meaning of their life together, it occurs to me that it can serve as a lesson. A lesson of devotion, commitment and love that two people can achieve. I would read poems and inspirational words from many different sources. Words of Austen and Dickinson to Shakespeare and Whitman, with many different verse in between.
To my surprise I found the words in the notes of Thomas Jefferson. He and his wife Martha were married for a mere 10 years, but their bond was one that only two people can understand fully. As Martha Jefferson lay dying in September 1782, she began to write out sentimental words to express a sense of the situation. She wrote, copying from her husband's own literary book, lines originally adapted from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
It is these words that complete my own parent's relationship of 59 years. One that I choose to remember and move on from. It will guide me in my father's remaining days and my own.
"Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen, the days and hours of it are flying over heads like clouds of (a) windy day never to return -- more every thing presses on --"
At this point she could write no more, but the words continue in Thomas' own handwriting.
"and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!"
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