Love for two

There is a story of a man who was married to a woman and he did something terrible that harmed their marriage and devastated the woman.

Early one evening shortly after the terrible thing was done they were together in the kitchen of their home. The woman stood with her back to her husband unloading the dishwasher. The room was smothered in a burdensome silence except for the occasional clinking of dishes as she put plates and cups away in the cabinets.

The man sat at the kitchen table in the dim light of the fading day. He stared straight ahead. His hands rested palms down on the hard wood of the table top. His eyes were fixed on the clock hanging on the wall by the back door. The second hand ticked smoothly around in a circle as time marched on. His aching mind was digging slowly through the last few days searching for the precise moment when it had all gone wrong.

He wanted to speak, but more than anything he didn’t want the difficulty between them to deepen. He feared his words would worsen things.

Certain that he wouldn’t be able to say the right thing, he withdrew deeper and deeper into himself. He felt his heart empty out.  He thought he might die or at least pass out.

The woman was both sad and outraged. She wanted to throw the dishes one by one through the window into the back yard. She wanted to curl up on the floor. She wanted him to stand up and do better. She wanted to travel back in time and change everything. She knew that he couldn’t speak. She knew that he was helpless to say anything, much less the right thing. She knew he was emptied out and full of regret and shame. She knew that her dream of the way things would be had to die. She looked up at the clock hanging by the back door. Then she turned toward her husband sitting stock-still at the table and she opened her mouth to speak.

“I can’t undo what you’ve done. And I know you can’t either. I don’t know why you did it, but I know you regret it,” she said.

The man closed his eyes against the tears that welled up like a river overflowing its banks.

“You’ve dragged the two of us down into this ditch and I can see you have not got the strength to get us out of it. You’re pretty well emptied out, aren’t you?”

He nodded his head slowly. She moved the short distance from the sink to the table and she put her hands gently on his head like some kind of healer. Then she pulled his head to her body and held on to him. Later he said she’d never done anything like that before and that he could feel something shift deep in his body when she touched him.

“I’ll get us through this,” she said.

“How?” He said.

“I’ll keep on loving you," she said, “that’s all there is to do. My love will have to be enough for the both of us.”

When the man told the story back years later he described that moment as his death and rebirth, as his conversion. He said that to that point he had no idea what love was. “Her love that night,” he said, “was not a sweet, tender love.” She was not a victim shouldering the weight of his sins. Her love was a fierce animal strength that would lead them through a storm and up a steep impossible mountain in the pitch black night. It would kill her and they would both live. “It was an unusual, great love,” he said, “that poured love slowly back into my own broken heart.”

They lived a long time after that dark night in which she loved greatly for the both of them. She carted off to heaven first and when he buried her he told the folks gathered at her grave that her love had saved them in a time when her love was all they had. He said, “Everything that came of our lives that was any good was because of her love. There was a time before I knew how to love when she loved for two.”