When I saw them, I was in the orthopedist’s waiting room with my son who was getting a cast on his arm after an unfortunate backwards tumble from a swing.
Quietly, I pointed her out to my son, “Look, she’s in a sling and a splint like you are. I wonder if she fell, too.”
They had to be in their eighties—she in a long skirt with her wispy white hair pinned up in the back, he with dress pants, a white short-sleeved button-down, and suspenders that made him look a lot like the protagonist in the movie Up. He stood behind her while she checked in at the the receptionist’s desk, and though she seemed not to notice, he gently tried to neaten the white strands of hair that had slipped from the French knot on the back of her head. Those sweet, light strokes against her hair told me everything I needed to know about their marriage.
When she turned around from the receptionist’s desk, he locked arms with her good arm and walked her carefully to a chair.
When we saw them again in the x-ray waiting room, they both gazed adoringly at my son. Probably don’t see kids very often at their age, I thought. At the intergenerational Bible study I lead at my house every week, the elderly ladies cannot take their eyes of my kids if they’re home. There’s a hungry look in their eyes. It dawned on me recently when my college freshman walked through the room during Bible study that every eye stayed on him. I see my kids every day. They miss seeing children every day. They feel about my children the way I feel when I see a baby in a young mother’s arms. Eleven years away from my youngest’s infancy, I long to feel that baby weight on my chest the way the older women in my Bible study yearn for the smile of a young person.
“Bless his heart,” the lady with her arm in a sling said with compassion. He held his broken wrist awkwardly while waiting for the radiologist, glad to be free of the splint he’d worn for three weeks, but ready for the support of the cast.
“That must hurt so much!” she lamented, ignoring her own heavily bandaged arm. My son nodded miserably before the radiologist whisked him in for an X-ray.
We bumped into them one last time as we scheduled our cast-off appointment at the receptionist’s desk.
“Take care of that arm, young man!” the older gentleman encouraged with a big smile, his hand on his wife’s shoulder to steady her.
“Hopefully no more falls from swings!” I called back to him as we exited the office, my son’s wrist now wrapped in neon green fiberglass.
That couple. You can’t set the minutia of life against a soundtrack, but I could hear the “The Swan” from “The Carnival of the Animals” lilting in my mind’s ear as I watched those old gentle hands fruitlessly smooth the stray wisps of white hair. I see them now, wrinkled and veined, nearly a century old.
We notice age, a little fearful of it. We see white hair and wrinkled skin, and we tend to dismiss old love as worn out and empty of passion or depth. But today I saw a man and woman so long loved that he probably feels the ache in her arm. Today I saw old love, well-worn love, love so grooved with familiarity and oneness that it took my breath away.
Photo by أخٌفيالله on Unsplash
