A Love Story

Forty-one years ago today, a bright-eyed twenty-two-year-old chemistry professor and his beautiful nineteen-year-old sweetheart eloped to Dearborn, Michigan. In those days, you had to be twenty-one to get a marriage license in Ohio without your parent's permission, and the girl's mother refused to sign because she wanted her daughter---her first child to go to college---to graduate. As a child, I viewed my grandmother as terribly unromantic and controlling whenever I heard this story. As a mother, I am quite a bit more sympathetic to her point of view. Still, as the baby that was born from this union ten months later, I can't exactly say that I think they should have waited. My mother did go on to graduate. Two babies later. With the help of many babysitting hours from her mother.

Shortly before my parents married, they met with my mother's doctor to discuss the mysterious illness she had suffered at sixteen. Her parents had never talked to her about it; they simply took her for the treatments and she didn't dare to ask more. The doctor informed my parents that my mother had come close to dying from Hodgkin's Disease, that she had received extensive radiation treatments, and that she may never be able to conceive and bear a child. She was in complete remission, but no one knew how long it would last. Without missing a beat, my dear father took the hand of the girl he loved and told her, "We'll take what we can get."

What they got was nine healthy children. And a life filled with love and adventure, laughter and tears. They remained happy and grateful for their love throughout the years, and they complemented each other so well. My father was a dreamer, and my mother let him be. He took care of her, and she took care of us. There were financial ups and downs, but my mother stood beside him through it all. She once wrote to my father's parents that she had never met a finer man. I could not have asked for a better model of true love.

After the birth of their ninth child, they discovered that my mother's heart was not working properly, an aftereffect of the heavy radiation she had received. She was placed on medication and began a nine year journey of gradual decline, unbeknownst to any of us for the most part. She collapsed on the evening of the baptism of her first grandchild, my daughter Elena, who had been named after my mother without my knowing what was to come. Six weeks later, on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, she passed from this life. As she lay dying, she wrote these final words to my father: "We always said we'd take what we could get. We have been very blessed."

Indeed.