If grand romantic gestures were my measure of true love, I never would’ve married my husband. He is nothing if not practical. He bought me a basic calculator our first Christmas together so I wouldn’t need a tutorial on Polish notation every time I asked to borrow his scientific one. He cooked pot roasts with carrots. He fixed things.
Twenty-two years after saying “I do,”—after date nights and disappointing one another, Saturday afternoon delights and parenting disagreements, unkind words and a secret lexicon—he ferried me from the hospital after breast cancer surgery.
My chest bore a mess of Frankenstein stitches and surgical drains hanging from my ribcage to collect my body’s excesses. The tangle of plastic tubes would need to be milked of cobwebby tissues, the fluid emptied from the collection bulbs multiple times per day, the production noted for post-surgical follow-up.
At home, my husband settled me at the kitchen island and quipped “Time to deal with your distillery.” He eased me out of the baggy camp shirt that would be my uniform for the duration these drains sprouted from my body. As he began to pinch the tube near the tender incision, the horror of it washed over me. I swooned.
I came to in my husband’s arms. He’d caught me before I toppled to the ground. A warm wet trail ran down my pantleg, my bladder having simultaneously given out. While he dialed 9-1-1, I cleaned up the puddle—my puddle—as waves of brokenness, unattractiveness, mortification crashed over me.
Calendar-ready EMTs swarmed within minutes to check my vitals. All systems normal, they diagnosed vasovagal syncope, a common nervous system overreaction triggered by things like the sight of blood or fear of bodily injury. Saying nothing about my accident, my husband telegraphed this would be our little secret.
My husband is not a man of surprise flower bouquets or elaborately planned date nights. But in the three weeks that followed my surgery, he took on my thrice-daily surgical drain maintenance. This after months of carrying the heavier household and childcare load while I completed chemo’s forced march. He dutifully measured and noted the amount of amber liquid produced by the still of my body like a detail-oriented bootlegger, making me laugh every time. He joked about our shocking fall from youth, about his expectation of future payback. As far as grand gestures go, this one was epic.
When I look back at our marriage vows, we didn’t even bother with the words “in sickness and in health,” instead saying “I promise to faithfully honor, respect, and cherish you through all of life’s changes.” Like most vows, more vision statement than comprehensive guarantee, we redirected all eyes to the hopeful bloom of life and minimized the hard fact that “until death do us part” includes bodies that are fickle. And gross. They gloss over the indignities of vomit and blood and pus, the whoopie-cushion deflation after a screening colonoscopy or pee on the kitchen floor. They never explicate the unglamorous ways bodies can wither or the unsexy dedication required for building a life together. Now I realize we’ve gotten it all wrong—we should include the fine print. Maybe then it’d be clear from the outset how showing up for the hard bits can refine love to its most potent essence if we let it.
