Seventy Years of Marriage
Visiting an old friend in Montreal, I am taken to visit her 91-year-old mother. She’s bent but lively, and her mind remains as fluid as ever. We speak in French, which is a trial for me, but I manage to capture most of what she says. It helps that she speaks the clearest French of anyone I know, having come originally from Bordeaux.
She lives in a nursing home that looks, on the upper floors, much like any apartment building. She receives help from physical therapists, aides and people who clean for her, and her room is bright, filled with old photos and new books, including those by President Obama, one of her heroes. (Omar Sharif is another, ever since his role in Doctor Zhivago.) All in all, especially with help from her daughter Elisabeth, she leads a pretty good life. She’s glad to see me, and I’m glad to see her.
But what stays with me after my visit is the story Elisabeth tells me of another old woman in the home, about the same age, who lives with her husband in a single room. They have been married for seventy years. And periodically, every three months or so, the woman undergoes a kind of meltdown. She takes the elevator down to the lobby and common rooms, deshabille, her clothes streaming off her, her arms raised and her voice in a roar.
‘It’s too much!” she screams in French. “Seventy years is too much! I can’t go on with this man, he’s hopeless, he’s killing me, I can’t stand it. Think of it, seventy years. No, it’s too long, a marriage should not go on so long. I need to be by myself. Is this never going to happen? Do I have to go on with him forever? He drives me crazy, some day I’m going to kill him. No, I cannot go on like this, I’m at the end of my rope. Seventy years is way too much!”
Her husband, I should point out, is completely compos mentis. Though sometimes cantankerous, he suffers from no dementia at all. Madame, it could be worse!
