Thoughts on Marriage from My 97 Year Old Grandfather.

My grandparents “celebrated” their 68th wedding anniversary this past week. I say “celebrated” because my grandmother was also put on hospice that day.

I sat with my grandfather and asked him why his marriage had survived 68 years when others all around us fall apart. (I got his answers on video, because–family history!)

He’s 97 years old, so his answers came out slowly but he was certain of his answers. He answered:

• We never competed against each other. We worked as a team.
• That grandma was a hard worker and helped him on the bogs. “We weeded the bogs together at night until the misquotes drove us home.” (Calling someone a “hard worker” is the highest possible compliment in his eyes.)
• She tried to help me save money by doing the work herself.
• I made decisions that allowed me to put family first. When I was offered a job that would take me away from Lillian and the kids, I said no. “I wanted to be at home with the family and I wanted to run the bogs the way they should be. If it wasn’t good for all of us, it wasn’t good.”
• Neither one of us cared about being big shots. We were happy to be at home.
• We took the kids with us when we worked on the bogs in the evening. They played on the shore while we worked. They had “everything they could want to make them happy while we worked: plenty of sand and water to keep them busy.”
• We tried to travel a little bit together.
• We enjoyed the same things.
• We were simple people and that’s the way we lived, and we mostly thought about the children.

Simpler times? I’m not sure of that.  Perhaps just simpler expectations and inner contentment and consideration for others were the magic bullet?