January 8: Put It Behind You, Strength of Love, Marriage

[Ives and his wife] moved downtown from Claremont Avenue some ten years before, in '84, after their apartment had been burglarized and because Annie though the change would do her husband good.  His stubborn inability to stop mourning their son, to keep his sorrow hidden from others but to let it flourish around her, had tempted Annie to leave him several times over the years.  But she loved him too much.  Again and again, she told him, "You have to put it behind you, my love," but as the years passed, nearly thirty of them, with their thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours, he still could not get a certain image out of his head:  his righteous and good son, stretched out on the sidewalk, eyes glazed and looking upward, suddenly aware and saddened that his physical life was ending, that image coming to Ives again and again.

Edward and Annie's marriage is tested in Mr. Ives' Christmas.  Ives simply cannot stop mourning.  For three decades, he keeps reliving the loss of his son.  Every day.  Every hour.  Ives is angry and sad and confused.  He does a good job of hiding these feelings from everybody but his wife, who bears the heavy burden of her husband's profound sorrow.  She contemplates leaving him, but she can't.  She loves him too much.

Many aspects of this novel move me.  However, the depth of love between Ives and Annie moves me the most deeply.  It's a love that has to endure great loss (the death of a child).  Yet it endures.  Because that's the power of love, full of sacrifice and struggle and hope.

Yes, I'm going to get a little sentimental in this post.  My marriage has endured a lot of hardships.  At one point, it even seemed as though it simply wasn't going to survive.  My wife was living in another town, a hundred miles distant.  I was raising our daughter by myself, with a lot of help from my family and my wife's family.  It was one of the darkest times of my life.  Some days, I would drag myself out of bed in the morning, drag myself through my work day, and then drag myself home.  It was like moving in slow motion every second.  And every second was a little painful.


But I didn't give up.  I took care of my daughter, and I tried to act with love and understanding toward my spouse (I didn't always succeed).  It wasn't easy.  But marriage isn't always easy.  It takes work and compassion and compromise.  This coming October, my wife and I will celebrate our twentieth anniversary.  Twenty years.  We have two beautiful children who know that they are loved and cherished.  We have a home.  And we have each other.  That's love.  Through the darkness and the light.  Annie Ives knows this.

Saint Marty knows it, too.

Someone who knew a great deal about love

August 6: Father's Love, Sharon Olds, "Looking at Them Asleep"

When I can get away from my normal life, concentrate on being a husband and father fully, I sometimes feel my heart bursting open like a tulip bulb in spring.  Love sort of overtakes me when I don't have the distractions of work and bills and teaching.  When it's just me and my family.

I know I walk a fine line of sentimentality when I write about my love for my wife and kids.  "Love" is a word that should be used sparingly, along with the words "sorrow" and "weep."  Anything that smacks too much of Jane Eyre and Heathcliff and moors should be avoided as much as possible by serious writers.

However, I am going to allow myself to be a little sentimental tonight.  I am happy, in this hotel room, my wife reading a novel in bed, my daughter and son passed out in various corners of the suite.  I know what love is tonight.

Sharon Olds is not afraid to write about love, either.

And Saint Marty loves the following poem.

Looking at Them Asleep

by:  Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie.  I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content--and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two.  When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Sing with me:  "All you need is..."