by Dave Isay
Gwendolyn: I remember when you came with the three ashtrays, I thought, Hmm. Maybe there was something to that bumping into the walls.
Henry: Why did you come and ask for a cigarette?
Gwendolyn: I was curious. The first time that you bumped into the wall, I thought, That guy’s a little uncoordinated—he should watch where he’s going. But the second time you bumped into the wall I thought you were trying to catch my attention by being silly. It wasn’t until you came back with the ashtrays that I realized you’d taken notice of the new girl on the floor.
Henry: We started going out after that. The next thing I remember, we went out dancing. I wanted to kiss you, but I didn’t know how to, so I asked permission.
Gwendolyn: We had been going out for a while. We weren’t terribly young, and I was rather surprised when you looked at me and said, “May I kiss you?” I told you something like, You shouldn’t have to ask. No one had ever asked my permission to be kissed. After you asked—I remember this—you looked me straight in the eye with a serious look, and you said, “I have to warn you. I’m very intense.” I just looked at you and didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, He doesn’t know what intense is, but he’s about to find out!
Henry: We’ve been married for a while now, and it has been an intense relationship. I was single for so many years, and I was never going to get married. But when you came into my life, I didn’t even have a second thought about it.
Gwendolyn: You know, after all these years—seventeen, eighteen years—I’m never tired of being around you. I love to come home and share my day with you. It’s not always perfect, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Recorded in San Antonio, Texas, on February 18, 2008.
WINSLOW E. JACKSON, 61, talks with his wife, DOROTHY B. JACKSON, 62
Winslow E. Jackson: In 1989 on my birthday I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was married and had four daughters, and I was doing fabulous at work.
Three years later my wife left me. We divorced, and she took my daughters. That was undoubtedly the saddest time of my life. When my daughters left I really fell into a depression. I felt so stranded.
In 1996, I took long-term disability and moved to Atlanta to be at the Shepherd Center, which specializes in MS. One day I was exercising there and I noticed a lady had parked her red scooter next to my—and I want to emphasize—my piece of gym equipment. I looked over, and I said, “Wow. Nice red scooter!”
And she smiled and said, “Well, thank you.” And I asked her what her name was. And she said, “Dorothy.”
Dorothy B. Jackson: I was almost sixty, had been living with multiple sclerosis for almost thirty years, could barely walk, and didn’t drive anymore. My family and closest friends were far from me and my husband of thirty-five years had died in a motorcycle accident. I was on my own. I was bewildered about where I was going or what I was going to do. I went through the motions of living, and I went to the gym to maintain my health.
I was in the gym one day and this man, who invariably used my favorite piece of gym equipment, asked me, “How do you like your scooter?” Well, I’ve heard lines like that before, but this time it was different.
That day we talked for fifteen or twenty minutes, and I found out that you also had MS. You played piano by ear—as do I—you played string bass for three years—as did I—you had lived in Germany and speak German—as do I. And of all things, your last name was Jackson, my maiden name. We immediately started speaking German with each other.
Winslow: We dated for a year and a half and really had a lot of fun. We were able to scrunch two scooters together in my car. Really, we could just about go anywhere. You were designated as—
Dorothy: —chief navigator.
Winslow: Until you made a mistake and took us off to Dayton when we were trying to get to Chicago, and you were demoted to junior navigator.
Dorothy: I didn’t make a mistake—this is just one of your many stories. [Laughs.]
Winslow: But my favorite experience was probably taking you to Chicago to meet my daughters. All of a sudden they were talking with you and not me—I was kind of left out of the conversation. And to this day it still goes on. Their favorite saying is, “Oh, poor Dorothy!”—for getting stuck with me.
Typically, it’s really difficult to be a caregiver for somebody with MS. It just strains the relationship, because we look like we’re healthy but inside we fatigue easily, and we have sensory problems. It’s kind of an invisible disease. And a lot of relationships don’t make it. So the question came up, How can two people with MS ever survive together? This has been the real miracle of our relationship—together we can do so much more. We’ve actually traveled the world.
Dorothy: There’s some things that we didn’t expect that make our partnership a particularly good one, such as if one of our scooters goes down, the other one has a scooter and can pull or push the other one.
Winslow: I’ve pulled you many times.
Dorothy: And I’ve pulled you.
Winslow: Today they have medications that can almost stop the progression of MS. So my symptoms, believe it or not, have not really changed in the last ten years. And your progression is the same. So I certainly am very hopeful that MS doesn’t worsen or stricken me to the point that I’m bedridden. I’m very hopeful that you will not worsen either, so we can continue to enjoy life to its fullest.
Dorothy: We’d like to think that we’re setting good examples of how to live life and have fun.
Winslow: Every day is exciting. Dorothy, thank you so much for being with me.
Dorothy: You’re so much fun to be with. Every day I awake and wonder what surprise you have in store for me. I look forward to continuing to see the world with you.
Recorded in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 12, 2010.
GLEN PARDY, 55, talks with his wife, SUE STEINACHER, 54
Glen Pardy: You came into my store. I owned a sign business in Fairbanks, and you worked for a government agency that needed a sign produced. And what ordinarily would have been a five- or ten-minute business meeting turned into a two-hour discussion of virtually everything under the sun.
Sue Steinacher: I still remember what you were wearing: that black shirt with the Nehru collar. What was a good thing, though, was that you were behind the counter, so I didn’t actually see that you wore black Velcro sneakers with white socks. But from the waist up you looked pretty good.
Glen: You looked pretty good head to toe, and I thought, Who is this tall, slender beauty? But I had always maintained something of a business philosophy that one shouldn’t necessarily hit on a customer. So we did the business transaction, and we manufactured a sign that said WELCOME TO ALASKA, and it’s still at one of the border crossings into the Yukon. But once the job was done you left town. Four years passed by until you needed another sign.
Sue: We went through the whole process of designing and building and getting it installed—and you still hadn’t made a move. Finally, I called you up and said I was ready to go out to dinner with you.
Glen: So we did. You were in town for seven days, and we went out five of those seven evenings. You went back to Nome, and we alternated phone calls and faxes. This was before either of us were e-mail people. We argued by fax. We told jokes. We made lists. We stayed in pretty serious touch.
Sue: I found that our first year of a long-distance relationship was actually a really good thing. You’ve got great handwriting.
Glen: You seemed actually interested in searching my soul to find the real person within. That was a new dynamic for me.
Sue: As hardheaded and as independent as I seemed, I had sunk to the point in some relationships where I thought, This one will really give me the love I want if I could only bake the perfect strawberry rhubarb pie or if I could only climb mountains faster—all these crazy ideas.
But I had come to a point where I wasn’t going to compromise anymore. Someone either had to choose me wholeheartedly or I would make the choice to just continue living alone.
Glen: It was an easy choice. I knew I’d found not only a lovely and attractive woman but in some ways the girl of my dreams. You had done so many interesting things: traveling to Russia; living in a log cabin without running water; raising a dog team; explorations by dogsled, and any of a number of other pretty amazing things for a gal from Long Island.
Sue: I’d always been chasing after men who I thought were what I wanted to be, or a more dynamic version of myself, and I would sort of graft off of their dynamism. And you were the opposite of that, because you fall into the “steady” category. I once called you a Boy Scout.
Glen: Which I thought was a compliment.
Sue: I know, and I didn’t. I just thought, Oh, he’s just too nice, he’s too steady, he’s too reliable. But I really felt like there was something here I had to hang on to.
We moved in together after a year. It was a big move and a bold move. But you know, at our age it was time to be bold. And we got along so well right off the start, didn’t we?
Glen: It’s true. I spent twenty-five years building and maintaining and struggling with a business and being so set in my ways that I could not imagine doing anything else for a living. Toward the end of that twenty-five years I was burned out and trying to think of a way out. Then you came into my life. Two weeks after we were married you got a job that paid pretty well, and I threw out everything I’d done for my adult life and went off to Nome with my new bride, not knowing what I was getting into. You can still grow, you can still change, and you’ve taught me all that.
Sue: We learned it together. And it was that business of yours that brought us together in the first place.
Glen: No, it was the yellow pages, dear.
Sue: That’s right. I caught you telling somebody that I had asked all around Fairbanks, “Who built those big beautiful sandblasted wooden signs?” And that’s how I had found you. I had to correct you by explaining, “No, I was looking in the yellow pages, and your shop was the closest to my office.” But it was the right choice. You’re my complement. You gave my life an anchor, and I’d like to think I’ve given your life wings.
Recorded in Nome, Alaska, on February 14, 2009.
THOMAS PETER HEADEN, 66, talks with his wife, JAQUELINE MARIE HEADEN, 65
Thomas Peter Headen: I was at a skating rink one night when I was sixteen, in 1958, and I saw this young lady skating around. I waited for her to take a break and get a Coke before I made my move. I grabbed you by the hand and said, “My name’s Thomas Peter Headen.” And you said, “My name’s Jacqueline LeFever.” I looked in those big green eyes, and it was a done deal.
So we dated. Then, in 1959, your father got transferred to Japan. I decided, Well, I’ll go get her. So I joined the Marine Corps, and I said, “I want to go to Japan.” The Marine Corps said, “You’ll go to Japan when we tell you you can go to Japan.” So I went to a base in California.
Jaqueline Marie Headen: I dated a marine while I was in Japan, and I ended up getting married—I guess just because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. We came back to the States in 1962, but I didn’t know what happened to you. What were you doing then?
Peter: Well, I finally got orders to Okinawa. And I said, Oh, boy. I’ll go see Jackie when I get to Japan! I was home on leave—you always get leave before you go overseas—and stopped by to see your mother and say hi. And she said right away, “Jackie got married. But here, you can have this picture of her.” I made some excuse that I had an appointment or something—the walls were kind of crawling in on me—and I left.
I went overseas to Okinawa for fourteen months, and then I came back to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, not knowing that you were right outside the gate of that base.
I got discharged, and I went home to Maryland. One night the phone rang—it was you.
Jackie: I came to visit my mom. And I was calling your mother to see where you were, and you answered the phone—I was shocked, needless to say.
Peter: You picked me up, and you said, “I want to show you something.” We went to your mother’s house, and here was this little baby sitting there. Your daughter was about three months old, and she had those same big green eyes.
You went back to North Carolina, and I reenlisted in the Marine Corps for another six years. That was 1964, and I said, “Send me overseas.” I didn’t want to be down in North Carolina where you’re sitting outside the gate. So I left on the twelfth of August for Vietnam. I came back to the States after twenty-six months and was stationed at Camp Pendleton, California.
One day I was sitting in the barracks and thinking about you, and I said, I’m going to write her a letter. So I wrote you a letter and told you how I felt, because we were going back to Vietnam and I didn’t want to be thinking about you on another tour in Vietnam. So I sent a letter off, and I was in Vietnam for four months before I even got an answer. And the first sergeant gives me the letter. He says, “You never get any mail, Headen.” It was a letter from you.
Jackie: I don’t know how the letter that you wrote found me. It was forwarded four times before I got it. You said, “I just have to get this off my chest—I love you. I’ve always loved you. I just have to say it and get it over with, and I’m done.” In the meantime I had had another child—a little boy. So there I was in an apartment with two little babies and just miserable, actually. I got married for all the wrong reasons. But I came from a divorced family, and I didn’t want my kids to have a broken home.
Peter: When I came back from Vietnam I spent twenty-four hours at home, and then I went to my mother at about four in the morning and said, “I’ve got to go to North Carolina.” And she kind of looked at me: “I think you better leave that one alone—she’s married. But I guess you got to do what you got to do.” I said, “Yeah, I got to do what I got to do.”
Jackie: I sent you away.
Peter: That was September twenty-fifth, 1968.
Jackie: Thirty years after that, I left my husband. It wasn’t easy. My kids were grown, they had their college education, they had their families, but I was lonesome and miserable.
Peter: I was sitting there one night, and the phone rang—matter of fact, it was September the twenty-fifth, 1998.
Jackie: That night—I had just made up my mind: I am out of here. I’m so unhappy. And I sat there—and I said, Nobody ever loved me but Peter. And that’s when I thought, I’m going to go find him. And so that’s what I did.
I asked the operator, “Do you have a T. P. Headen in Waldorf?” And she said, “No.” And I said, “Well, I’m really desperate to find this person. I know he’s in Charles County, Maryland, somewhere.” And she said, “Let me check.” She said, “I have a T. P. Headen in White Plains.”
So I said, “Oh, my God, that’s it! That’s him!” I started crying, and I said, “I have been trying to find this person for thirty years, it’s the love of my life.” And she said, “You want me to dial the number for you?” I said, “Yeah, you can dial the number.” She said, “Can I stay on the line?” I said, “I don’t care what you do!”
Peter: And you said, “You know who this is?”
I said, “Yeah, I know exactly who this is.”
You said, “I bet you’re mad at me.”
I said, “No. Matter of fact, I’m still in love with you.”
Jackie: I felt like I was fifteen all over again. We just talked like it never had been all those years in between. We decided we would meet in Memphis, and I picked you up at the airport. You jumped in the car and gave me a big old kiss.
Peter: We got married in May, the fifteenth. I took you down to Key West and out on a three-masted schooner, and we married at sunset. There’s no addres
s on our marriage certificate, just a longitude and a latitude.
It’s worked out well. It’s just sad, the time we lost—you can’t get that back. We could have been together when we were eighteen, nineteen, you know? But I got you back. And you’re just as beautiful as you were when you were fifteen.
Jackie: That’s because you make me feel beautiful.
Recorded in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, on June 4, 2009.
JO ANN CHEW, 82, talks with her husband, ROBERT CHEW, 70
Jo Ann Chew: My father said if he sent me to college, I could choose one of two things: I could choose a secretarial course or I could choose home ec, because, he said, “I know you’ll be somebody’s wife.” So I decided home ec was the way to go.
Robert Chew: Are you still cooking today?
Jo Ann: Not today. I have been up to this point, but I have Alzheimer’s. My doctor told me he doesn’t want me to cook—and that was music to my ears!
Robert: So how did we meet?
Jo Ann: You came to our church and I’m trying to think . . . Somehow we got together, and I don’t even remember how it was. I bet you remember.
Robert: Remember the Christmas parties?
Jo Ann: Oh, yeah—that’s right. I called you up and I said, “What are you doing over the holidays? I’ve got a lot of invitations to parties and I don’t have anybody to escort me.” After a few months my heart began to beat a little faster, and I think yours did too. Then we decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, and we got married.
Robert: So had you thought about remarrying?
Jo Ann: No. No, no, no, no. It wasn’t in my book. I just thought I was too old to be thinking of that. And I kept trying to dissuade you from marrying me, because I was ten years older than you were, and I knew that there would come a time when I would be a little old lady and you would still have all the marks of a ten-year-younger man. How old was I when we got married?