Reflections on a Decade

Wow - the first of December. Not sure where time goes any more. It seems to be rushing by just like it did when I was 17.

Tomorrow will be Dean’s and my 10th anniversary. Amazing. Didn’t I just arrive in Tahoe? Isn’t this still a “new” relationship? I guess part of that has to do with an insight Dean shared last month.

He mentioned that this was our 50th year of marriage. I laughed and said, it may feel like that and we had really been married almost 10. No, he reminded me. We both married for the first time in 1961. Yes, there was a little break for both of us after more than 35 years of marriage after both spouses died. And then we married - ergo: we have been at this marriage business for 50 years. Amazing.

And have we gotten it “right” yet? :) I don’t know. With 50 years comes some wisdom and the one thing I do know is that trying to live with another person, even someone you love, is just plain hard. Some of us have it easier than others and really do enjoy our time with our spouse. I think we were both devastated when our first spouses died. I know I was. Then we found each other and as Dean puts it, “now we get to do it all over again.” I guess that means we had good marriages the first time around because the good ones are hard enough. To go through it again if it had been awful is just not the way to go.

Before I ever reconnected with Dean, I asked an older woman who had been a widow for a long time if she had ever considered marrying again. This lovely little old lady looked at me with fire in her eyes and said, “HA! Been there, done that.” And that closed that subject! I realized then that the first experience had a Lot to do with whether you wanted the second or not.

And so it has been ten years. You don’t just exchange one spouse for another so we have had our ups and downs learning lessons we thought we had learned before only to realize we learned them with someone else. I am not Nancy. Dean is not Rex. So we have learned to be Susan and Dean together. We’re doing fairly well at that. After ten years we deal with who we are now and have become rather than who we were in our first marriages.

Time continues to slip by. Days come and go. We grow, we change. Basically we are happy and content in a rather exciting way. Comfortable does not have to be dull, witness camping in Death Valley and celebrating life with eleven grand-children. So it is with joy that I celebrate with some amazement the passing of ten years and look forward to the future sharing life with my first-grade buddy.