Older and Wiser
Floyd and Violet Hartwig died hand-in-hand after 67 years of marriage. (Cynthia Letson/ABC News)
It’s a bittersweet real life Nicholas Sparks story. Floyd and Violet Hartwig died just five hours apart on February 11th. Violet has been suffering from dementia for a few years when Floyd went into kidney failure and was given two weeks to live. Their daughter made accommodations for the couple to share a hospice room and, when the time coming for for Floyd to go, she placed her parents’ hands together. Although Violet was not coherent, her family told her of Floyd’s passing. Five hours, she joined her husband.
Amongst the barrage of divorce statistics, celeb break up news, and cheating scandals, it’s refreshing to know that true, lasting love and respect still show a glimmer of hope. Thank you Floyd and Violet!
Read the whole story at ABC!
I knew everything was going to change when I turned thirty and got married in two consecutive days. But I figured there was no reason to space out these major life events. Bring it on, I told myself. Let’s see what the future holds.
Then nothing changed. My husband and I had been together for a year and a half, and we had moved into a new apartment in the months preceding our wedding. I had already phased out my dah of guys and adjusted to a warm and easy routine of contented coupledom. I’d also gone through a ‘process of strategic career adjustment’ (as I deemed it) and was finally embedded in a creative day-to-day of reading about medieval art and philosophy, attempting to write plays, screenplays and novels, and playing music on my piano, flute and guitar.
My world had changed without my noticing it. I realized, with some shock, that I had changed as well.
What had happened to the flitting, pugnacious, amorous and shameless twenty-something lady I had been? How had she disappeared, fading away even from my mind, absolutely, and without saying goodbye?
I became introspective. I had changed, but how and into what? Who had I become?
My favorite English teacher had always said, “people don’t change, they just become more themselves.” I felt this observation to be true. I had evolved, or returned, to a more authentic version of myself. But I was caught pondering: How did the disparate decades of my life cohere? What the heck had I been doing then and what the hell was I doing now?
Read the rest at 40:20 Vision, where a celebration of ‘thirty-somethings’ is underway!
photo credit: Aisha Singleton Photography
You know you’re not supposed to compare yourself to others. We all know this. And yet, sometimes it’s hard to stop the grass-is-always-greener mentality. Watch this to remind yourself why your life is your life, and why that’s awesome.
Sorry. I’m sorry. My bad. OMG I’m so sorry!!! — any of these sound way too familiar to you? I say some variation of “I’m sorry” far too often. If I do something to upset somebody, then a heartfelt “I’m sorry” is necessary and appreciated. But sometimes I feel like I’m apologizing for my very existence. I say “I’m sorry” for things that I shouldn’t say it for. And it’s exhausting.
I’ve written before about how women feel the need to apologize for themselves, their actions, and their ideas far more than men do. We’ve been subtly taught to do so. I remember working in the corporate world how many times smart young women would introduce their ideas with, “Sorry if this has been done before…” or “I think I have an idea, sorry if it won’t work…” whereas the men never once began their sentences with an apology.
Overthinking: easy to start, so freakin’ hard to stop. Luckily, with practice, you’ll find that regular thinking is good enough for most decisions.
I have decided that age is a very, very weird thing. When I was a freshman in high school, I met this kid at Mad Science camp who was three years younger than me (a 6th grader, naturally). He was a nice little boy with good taste, therefore he hung on my every word and regarded me as a goddess. While my fourteen year old self was secretly, wildly flattered, my public high school persona was mortified that a boy this young had a crush on me.
We remained friends for a number of years, as it turned out that he was the son of one of my mother’s church friends. I would see him maybe a couple times a year and, every time, he would treat me with the same, puppy-like affection. A small part of me felt a little bad for never overtly telling him no, but the bigger part of me relished the undivided attention (because really, there is nothing I crave more in life than attention).
After I graduated high school and left Nashville for Boston (he had just finished his freshman year), we fell completely out of contact. Sure, we were Facebook Friends, but what does that really mean in today’s society? One day, not long after I left, the internet told me that he had a girlfriend. “Good for him!” I thought, and put it out of my mind.
Whenever anyone starts a relationship or meets someone, the first thing people want to know is, “What do you have in common?” On the surface this seems like a good question and one that warrants serious thought. The more I think about it, though, and think about my wife and I, it seems to me that what you have in common is not the most important thing. In fact, having things not in common makes for a more interesting life in the long run.
Here are some things I DO NOT have in common with my wife… and I believe add to our relationship rather than take away from it.
They stood in their colorful cardboard boxes, regiments of laser armed plastic figures, beckoning for adventure. I was on a shopping errand at Target, pushing my little red cart through the store while keeping an eye out for decent deals. When I drifted into the toy aisle … Instead of speeding through, I froze in front of the action figure shelves as a blast of nostalgia drove my memory back in time to the fifth grade. Hasbro had re-minted all the toys I grew up adoring — in vintage packaging! Luke Skywalker in Bespin gear, Jabba the Hut play set and the coveted G.I. Joe Sky Striker Combat Jet. (I was a virgin in high school, Dungeons and Dragons manual included.)
I was a sophomore in college when my heart started skipping beats. Not metaphorical beats—real ones. It felt like a hiccup, followed by a suspended pause that went on *just* an instant too long, just long enough for adrenaline go swooping through me, and then the next beat would come, and I’d breathe again. But sometimes, the beats would come back wrong. Instead of a nice, normal pace, my heart would be thudding away like I’d been sprinting up a hillside—all while I was sitting motionless in a chair. I would pinch my wrist with my other hand, feeling the thrum of my veins under my fingertips, and count: 120 beats per minute. 130. For no reason. For minutes, sometimes hours, at a time.
The college health center had no idea what was wrong with me. The first time the weird heartbeat stuck for few hours, I spent the night down there under observation; they could see that my heart was working in an abnormal rhythm but they had no idea why, or how to fix me. That time, it went away on its own, as spontaneously as it had started.
A couple of months ago, I went shopping with two of my sisters with the sole purpose of finding a prom dress for my youngest sister. We visited four or five stores and scoured racks upon racks of gowns, hoping to find the perfect dress for the biggest party of her senior year.
Although this isn’t her first prom—it’s actually her third go-around—she’s still super-excited. And she should be, because prom is a pretty big deal. In fact, for a lot of people, prom is one of the fanciest nights of their lives (other than their potential future wedding, of course).
The planning begins weeks, maybe months in advance. Ladies schedule appointments for hair, manicures and tanning. They wear gowns, sometimes dropping hundreds of dollars for a dress many of them know they’ll only wear once. The dudes rent tuxedos. Boutonnieres and corsages are exchanged! Limos are rented! (Well, not at my rural, middle-of-nowhere school. Some kids might’ve borrowed a grandparent’s Lincoln or Cadillac, but most of us arrived in washed-and-waxed pickup trucks and mid-sized Fords or Chevys.)
We all know one: that girl who’s got a list, either squirreled away in a paisley-covered journal she keeps in her underwear drawer, or perhaps simply engraved on a few dedicated kilobytes in her brain, of the qualities she’s looking for in her future husband. Maybe you are that girl. And if you are, well, you’re probably going to get mad at me when I tell you your list is bullshit. And you’re entitled to—but first, hear me out.
The first reason it’s bullshit: 90% of what’s on the list should go without saying. It’s basic good-human-being stuff, like humor and brains and kindness and integrity, or it’s good-partner stuff, like having a steady head on his shoulders and a direction in his life and an overall effect of making you want to bone him. And you don’t need to itemize those things because you should never so much as pursue a relationship with a man who’s without them, let alone marry him. The last thing you should need to do is consult a cheat sheet to remind yourself.
The second reason it’s bullshit: the other stuff on your list is filler. Yes. It is. It’s things you think you want, things you think you need, but the truth is that if you’ve found a man who has that first 90% solidly covered, then the rest is variable, unnecessary and at best barely relevant. Relationships are imperfect because people are—you know damn well that you are—so why are you entitled to demand perfection of him?
“I would never cry over a dude. That’s something that I’ll never do.”
It would be natural to think this quote was uttered by a lady, maybe in her mid-twenties or early thirties, who is jaded by the modern dating scene. Someone who has “been there, done that” with one too many lame dates and failed relationships.
But this declaration didn’t come from a woman well versed in heartbreak. It came from a preteen girl, gossiping with her girlfriends about a young crush gone wrong. She said this with total conviction, and her friends seemed to agree: none of them would be crying over dudes. Absolutely not.
Her statement struck me because I grew up with a similar mentality, though I wasn’t exactly proclaiming that I’d never cry over a guy. My attitude was more that I was too embarrassed to even admit when I liked a boy, most likely out of fear of rejection. The approaches seem different on the surface, but the motivation is the same: suppress your emotions and you won’t get hurt.