When Gary and I married in 1995, his third marriage and my second, many of our friends were having twenty-five-year anniversaries. In characteristic Gary fashion, he made a joke of it: “My friends are renewing their vows, and I’m counting wives.” I was more subdued. I’d come out of a twenty-four-year marriage, just short of the twenty-five-year milestone, and I felt embarrassed, and like a failure—divorce will do that to you.

All that aside, we both wanted to sustain a marriage; we valued the twenty-five-year marriage, and we knew we had found the person we wanted to spend it with. The soulmate stuff of dreams. We’d fantasize about our twenty-five-year anniversary, when we’d renew our vows and have a big party. Since we were in our early fifties, we would be in our seventies by then, and we had every reason to believe we could make that, a romantic goal of sorts.

After we committed to each other, we did a complete start over, with a move from Minnesota to Utah, where I took my first professor position at the University of Utah after finishing my PhD at age fifty. We bought a house, and looked for new friends, which was not easy since we were not Mormon. We found them, however, at the Unity Church of Salt Lake City, a refuge for transplanted Californians and fallen Mormons. It was an interesting congregation, and we immediately felt at home. I had a women’s group and Gary made a friend named John.

Then it happened. No one quite realizes when they are busy living life that it can turn on a dime. Gary was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April 1996, only a year after our marriage. What started out so hopeful veered into something we could never have anticipated.

At the time, we were told Gary would live six to eight months without treatment and twelve to eighteen with an operation to route his digestive system around the tumor. The surgery was followed by radiation and chemo. Last in the treatment was something called gemcitabine, a drug that could prolong life but not cure him. He endured infusions faithfully every two weeks starting in August.

Five months later, in January 1997, Gary announced a break from the gemcitabine. He said, “I don’t have much time left, and I don’t want to spend it feeling sick all the time. Besides, it only gives me a few more months, and I’d rather have fewer than spend my time miserable.”

It was his body, what could I say? That I wanted to hang on to him as long as possible? That I wanted to feel him next to me in the bed, even on the hard nights when neither of us slept? And
that I wanted a few more of those Sundays when he felt well enough to go to church? That said, I did not want him to suffer. . . after all, I loved him.

We’d started the cancer journey together, sharing our every thought. When Gary announced dropping the chemo, I suddenly realized that we’d stopped talking altogether; we’d stopped loving together—not sex, just simply loving each other and processing what was coming. He was in his world of dying, and I was in mine of being the nurse. It came down to sharing his Ativan at night so we both could sleep. It wasn’t until many years after Gary’s death that I realized that he had to pull away. How does one leave this world when you’re deeply tied to it? He had to find a way to accept what was coming, and dreaming and planning with me for an unlikely future would not get him there.

For some reason, a month later, Gary suggested that we needed to celebrate our second anniversary, since we would not get another one. I immediately shut down. I wasn’t ready to face this eventuality—didn’t he want to fight? Maybe there’d be some new clinical trial he could try. How hard I made it for him to talk about his death—I realize that now, twenty-five years later. Like Gary, I was in survival mode. My mind pestered me—maybe he’ll make a third anniversary, don’t give up, he might surprise everyone, look how good he looks (he looked like a skeleton). I let his comment about “celebrating” pass. And we were in Utah with our family back in Minnesota. There was no one to celebrate with. Gary couldn’t eat out; he could barely eat at all. We wouldn’t be going out for dinner. There really was nothing we could do to celebrate—maybe get each other a mushy card. I thought back to Christmas, when he’d felt strong enough to shop for me. His first stop was a computer store, where his energy flagged, so he bought me all kinds of computer programs and games. As the saying goes, “His heart was in the right place.”

Sunday, the week of our anniversary, Gary said he felt well enough to go to church. Great! “Why don’t you dress up,” he said. “I love seeing you in a dress.” I didn’t want to, but I pulled on a loose but nice dress that I could be comfortable in and donned the despicable panty hose and heels. I don’t remember the service. Church was more a time to simply let go from the weeks of watching Gary die. As church ended and we rose to leave, I noticed several people from my department at the University of Utah gathered in the back. Frances, our office secretary, and David, the chair of the department—both devout Mormons; Diana, a fellow professor and her husband; Bob Johnson, another professor and former Baptist preacher; my friends from the women’s group and one of them with a video camera. What were they doing there with huge smiles on their faces?

Suddenly, Gary knelt in front of me, and said, “Karen, will you marry me again, knowing all you know now that is going to happen?”

My hands covered my face; I started to cry. “Yes! Yes! Of course.”

And we proceeded to have our “twenty-fifth anniversary” with the renewing of our vows. Gary had dug them out and given them to the minister. The ceremony started. Many people from that Sunday’s service stayed. John, Gary’s friend, was his best man, and Bob Johnson from the university walked me down the aisle. My friend, Judy Wolf was my maid of honor.

After we’d said the vows, Gary turned to everyone and told them a story about our original wedding. I’d hired a local pianist to play a song for us, but the minister had forgotten to cue the song, so we never got our song. Gary said, “This song is for my wife who never got her song the first time we married.” One of the church artists sang “Time After Time,” which I thought was perfect.

After the service, we had cake and beverages, all arranged by my friend Judy. I cried through most of the event, and I’m not much of a crier. He remembered. He remembered our dream of twenty-five years. It mattered to him as much as it had to me. We wouldn’t have it, but we had this. We’d been together a short five years, five years I would never forget.

I floated through the rest of the day, feeling incredibly loved. I float now when I think about a man, slowly wasting away, finding the imagination and time to remind the person he married of how much he loved her, how much the short marriage had meant to him.

The next few months before his death were difficult, filled with unremitting pain and progressive deterioration. I did my best to support Gary and simply love him.

In the years that followed, sometimes I remembered our anniversary on February 25, and sometimes I did not. I remember once checking the date, worried that I had it wrong. Then came February 2020, the year when we would have had our twenty-fifth anniversary. My heart reminded me of the tears and joy of our “twenty-fifth anniversary” and how our love held steady. I bought red roses to commemorate the day.

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