It has been nearly two decades now since I first visited my friends Katherine and Tom in their home. I'd brought an ornament for the tree as instructed (one I'd hand painted) and arrived timely for their annual Solstice party, an event so extraordinary that this year 60 people made it through 15 inches of snow. But they live in Martha's Vineyard now and I am still whiling away my time in DC. So I have not been in more than a decade despite being faithfully invited every year.
The first time I visited I was treated to a tour of their home. Both are avid cooks and even now, when I am in distress and say "I've taken to my kitchen" I can picture both of them at their huge stove in a kitchen perfectly outfitted with tools meant to last. As they work away, 30 year partners finely tuned to the ways of each other, they are simply delighting in the experience of doing something together. Tasting, smelling, feeling.
My favorite part of the home tour was a visit to their bathroom. They'd found it too small so they knocked out the wall to the room next door and made it bigger. In their remodelled bath was a large clawfoot tub and next to it a rocking chair so that Tom could read to Katherine while she bathed.
It is to me still the epitome of romance. But more than romance, there is a timelessness in the kind of love that has a man reading to a woman while she soaks in a tub. To simply be there with her in a moment that is about her.
They'd been together for many years before they actually married. Sitting in the cafeteria over lunch one day I asked her why they finally "tied the knot" and her answer was simply "insurance reasons." Over the years some of the rest of the story unfolded and it turns out the insurance issue was the broader one of "what is family?" Apparently Tom had ended up in the hospital - a fall I think - and Katherine had found herself unceramoniously removed from his hospital room by Tom's daughters, who were still unwilling to accept their father's relationship with her. I have no doubt that whatever reservations they had about marriage were resolved when faced with very real issue of people outside of their relationship defining the morality of the couple.
As I write this the smell of a beef dish with fennel and onion wafts from my kitchen. It is joined by the overtones of baking rosemary bread. I'd put it all on to cook and because cooking always makes me think of Katherine and Tom, I remembered I'd not yet read their most recent update.
Mid-stream in Tom's blog - ruminations - he writes: "Clearly, my death has been postphoned by four months but my life has not been extended by one minute while it has produced four months of misery for my caretakers."
At that line I am crying, as I have many times after first learning of Tom's cancer diagnosis, treatment, remission, and the re-emergence. I am praying hard again for Katherine, a woman who considered herself "just a librarian", who introduced the CIA to the internet, who wrote wonderfully whimsical guinea pig poetry - and who had a herd of guinea pigs underfoot while she cooked in her home in Bethesda (today she has an entire porch dedicated to finches!) She has always had long white hair pulled back in a braid hanging down her back and I cannot imagine her any other way. I cannot imagine her without the whimsy, the earthiness, the Texas steel that seems to seep through every pore of her body. I cannot imagine her without Tom.
I don't know how Tom and Katherine came to be together. I know there is an age difference somewhat similar to mine and Chris's and I know that apparently his family did not approve of her. I don't know where the mother of his children was in all of this and nor do I care. For it is Katherine who extends his soul and that I know with certainty that who ever came before and for however long, Katherine was the one intended for him. The mate to his soul.
Now they fight fiercely a disease that fully intends to separate the two of them and I anticipate the collapse of her heart when it finally wins. She is one of the strongest people I know but I cannot imagine how even that strength will bear her up under the grief that will surely fall upon her. He does not leave her willingly. I don't know if he realizes that every breath he takes - whether in sickness or in health - is a breath she treasures with every fiber of her being.
It is not a love I would have understood when I first met them. I recognized it but understood it to be so rare that I could never expect to be so lucky. I now understand. And I understand that it isn't a love that has to be approved of to exist. It simply is.
NL
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