Love is easy to recognize at the beginning. It is there in the nervous first date, the anticipation of a phone call, the first kiss, and the letter that arrives with a familiar name written across the envelope. I learned that love looks different after sixty years. By then, it has passed through marriage, children, work, illness, fear, and loss. It is no longer simply something you feel. It becomes part of the way you have lived.
Carol and I met when we were teenagers in Illinois. We began dating in 1959 and married in June 1964. During those early years, school often kept us apart, and letters became one of the ways we remained close. Long-distance telephone calls were expensive, but a postage stamp was affordable, so we wrote to each other almost every day. Some letters were long. Others were much simpler. There were days when engineering school left me with little more to say than, “I love you.” Somehow, those words were enough.
We never imagined those letters would one day become a record of our life together. We were not writing for a book or trying to preserve some grand romance. We were young, separated by distance, and trying to remain part of each other’s everyday lives.
The Woman Who Spent Her Life Caring for Others
Carol became a nurse, just as she had planned when she was young. She spent her career beside people who were frightened, injured, sick, and sometimes dying. One of her letters from 1964 told me about a cancer patient who died during her shift. She wrote about his pain, his family, and how difficult it must be to know someone is dying while still wishing it were not true.
Neither of us knew then how personally we would one day understand those words.
Years later, Carol was diagnosed with breast cancer. She lived with the disease for thirteen years. It eventually spread to her liver and bones, and much of her final decade involved chemotherapy. I watched the woman who had cared for so many patients become a patient herself.
I hated what cancer did to her, but I never stopped recognizing the woman underneath it. Carol remained thoughtful, funny, strong, and concerned about everyone around her. Even when her own health was failing, she worried about me.
There were mornings after the cancer returned when I would crawl beneath the blankets beside her and cry. Eventually, Carol gently told me that we had to stop crying every morning. What she really meant was that I had to stop. Even then, she was helping me find a way forward.
Love Became Care
When we were teenagers, love meant missing each other and waiting for the next letter. Later, love became something much more practical.
It meant appointments, medications, hospital visits, helping when she was weak, and trying to make life normal when nothing felt normal anymore. It meant staying beside her when there was nothing I could fix.
Near the end, Carol came home. Her hospital bed was placed next to mine in our bedroom, and I cared for her at night. During our final Friday night together, she slept comfortably while I stayed beside her. We held hands through the night.
The following evening, June 13, 2015, I was still holding her hand when she died. I leaned over, kissed her one last time, and held her close.
The boy who had once been too awkward to understand that Carol wanted him to hold her cold hands on their first date was holding that same hand at the end of her life.
I think about that often.
What Was Left Behind
After Carol died, people encouraged me to stay busy. They meant well. I tried dinners with friends, activities, and anything that might keep my mind occupied. But grief was waiting at home.
It lived in ordinary things. A shopping list in Carol’s handwriting. Her belongings. Familiar places. Her recorded voice on the telephone. There seemed to be a thousand things in the house capable of making me cry.
Eventually, I gathered enough courage to go into our bedroom closet and bring down the box of love letters.
There were hundreds of them, many still in their original envelopes. The earliest had been written when we were teenagers. I read them alongside the scrapbooks Carol had carefully kept through our marriage. I cried for hours, but I smiled too.
The letters returned a version of Carol that cancer could never touch.
There she was at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. There was the young nursing student writing about her day. There was the girl telling me she missed me. There was the woman planning a future with me before either of us had any idea what that future would contain.
An Ode to the Life We Shared
Cancer took a great deal from us. Death took the one thing I wanted most: more time with Carol.
But neither could take away what had already happened.
They could not erase our teenage years, our wedding, our children, our home, the years we spent growing older together, or the hundreds of letters we exchanged before any of it had happened.
When Carol first wrote those letters, they helped us survive distance. More than fifty years later, they helped me survive another kind of separation.
I do not read them because I want to live in the past. I read them because they remind me that the life we shared was real. Her handwriting is real. Her words are real. The love between the young people who wrote those pages became the marriage we eventually lived.
More than fifty years later, I can still open an envelope and hear Carol speaking to me.
Cancer could not take that.
Loss could not take that.
And as long as I can hold those letters in my hands, some part of our conversation continues.
I compiled those conversations into a book, an ode to our love. Click here to learn more.