Columnist Bill Herr taught high school mathematics and science for 32 years before serving as a volunteer and then as a staff chaplain at two nursing homes.
By Bill Herr
The love between married couples is powerful, and as chaplain I witnessed it among couples that lived in the nursing home. Here are several examples.
John and Sarah was a close couple. They did not have children. He had been a farmer, and was one of the first in the area to do custom combining for other farmers.
John always asked me to read Psalm 100 when I visited him. Sarah had been an outstanding nurse in the local hospital. She was gifted in needlework and had crafted two large replicas of the Last Supper, one of which hung in a frame on the wall of the nursing home chapel.
At the nursing home Sarah had Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). She couldn’t speak, and lay in bed all the time. Her room was across the hall from John’s. I would visit John and he would tell me about their lives together. After leaving his room, I would go across the hall to Sarah’s room. I introduced myself and then told Sarah everything John had told me. She would turn her head toward me and I knew she heard everything I said.
Tonya and Dr. Tom were a couple that lived in the same room at the nursing home. He was a physician that had been voted the outstanding physician in Ohio by his peers. Tonya was his nurse at his office location. I asked Dr. Tom if he ever delivered triplets. “Once,” he said. “It was in the couple’s home and when the husband came to the door and saw the third baby, he fainted.”
Sarah was an excellent piano player. She would sit and play the piano while Dr. Tom sat beside her with his arm around her. He would sing the hymn she was playing. He said to me, "She is the love of my life.”
Ruby had a great personality and her laugh was loud and contagious. She gave me some cookies and insisted I take them. They were delicious, and when my wife made cookies, I gave Ruby some of them. Ruby’s husband had been killed in World War II. She kept a picture of him in his uniform in her purse. It was in a frame and at every meal she would take his picture out and stand it up in front of her while she ate.
Lila had advanced AD. She slept most of the time. Before she reached that stage, she had a fun personality that was evident when she first came to the nursing home. I was sitting at a table visiting with someone one day and she walked past me, reached over and brushed her hand over the spot on my head that was bare of hair. Her husband had a thick head of hair. I told him I checked in the mirror every day after that for a while to see if some new hair follicles were growing.
When Lila was eventually confined to staying in bed, her loving husband came every day to sit with her. He always brought a small sucker and her mouth would work on that sucker until it was gone except for the stick. She never responded to him, but he would talk to her about their children and mostly just sit quietly with her while she worked on that sucker. When I asked about the sucker, he said, “It’s my way of telling her I still love her.”
The process of aging brings changes in the lives of all couples, but neither illness, nor death, nor anything else can change the love between a husband and wife. Love is one of God’s great gifts to humanity.
