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Continued: An EXCERPT from It's All Love
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My Own Happy Ending (for Joe) by Marita GoldenA lot of what my therapist taught me was straight up old school, lessons we learn at home from parents who love us. I had to forgive the boyfriend, who I asked to move out after the second session. I had to stop dissing him with every breath. If he was so bad, why had I chosen him? He had loved my son and me the best way he knew how. I had to take responsibility for bringing him into my life, my bed and my heart. I had to forgive and forget a period I looked on as wasted because it had been so difficult. I had to move on.
So on the morning of the day of the party where I met Joe, all that was behind me. That evening I strode into the home of the friend who was giving the party, sublime and content. Unperturbed. Then at 10:45 I glanced at the front door where I saw Joe entering with a friend who was tall and ebony hued and had an open, friendly face. But it was Joe who caught my eye. I looked at him and my heart didn’t skip a beat. It didn’t need to. I knew that I was looking at my man. I nudged my friend Louise who had come to the party with me and whispered, “There he is.” Earlier that day I had told her about my premonition, my certainty that I was going to meet him at the party that night. She had warily accepted this possibility with a stunned, breathless “OH,” when we spoke on the phone that morning. But I suspect that she still thought maybe I had lost it.
Joe entered the house joking, smiling, and hugging the Tina, the hostess who was an old friend. Tina was a member of a single parents group I had started and I later learned that Joe wasn’t even supposed to be at the party. He’d bought a ticket to the Dominican Republic, but when Tina playfully threatened never to speak to him again if he didn’t come, he cancelled his trip. Despite the handshakes and greetings offered to those he apparently knew in the room, Joe had seen me, for only a few minutes after entering, he made his way through the crowd to the corner where Louise and I stood. He and his friend Issa, a jovial Senegalese, introduced themselves. But really, no introductions were necessary for either of us. That’s how it felt, as I basked in his clear eyed appreciation of what he saw when he looked at me. I was drawn to how comfortable he seemed in his own skin, how easy he was with everyone around us. His humor and laughter were genuine and sprang from a place of integrity I felt inside his soul. Soon we were dancing. And talking. In the next hour, in Tina’s blue light lit basement I learned that Joe was Rayford Johnson come to life. He taught math and computers at Dunbar, the same school where Rayford Johnson taught. Like Rayford, Joe was a proud race man. We talked about everything from Jesse Jackson to our concern about black youth, to his travels in the Black world, from Surinam to Brazil, and my four year stint in Nigeria.
He asked for my phone number and the next morning I called Tina to get a “background check.” I knew Joe was mine, but I still wanted to tread carefully, and checking with Tina, who also taught at Dunbar and had known Joe for over a decade, was even better than enlisting the services of the FBI. Tina said simply “Marita, Joe is one of the best men in the world. You could not do better.”
In the coming weeks we didn’t date so much, as slip into the fold of what we had both been waiting for. Joe was a 44 year old bachelor who had decided three years earlier that he was ready to get married. Joe told me he had nearly given up on finding a soul mate in the US and had concluded that his life partner might be in some black country overseas. When I met his family, I knew I had come home. Joe had long standing and deep friendships with men in which they offered each other the kind of emotional support I had only seen women offer each other. He had female friends with whom he had established relationships of respect and support, and he was enormously proud of my accomplishments, bragging about my books and writing to everyone he introduced me to. Joe’s dreams were as big as mine. On our first date, he took me to see the shell of a house he had just bought and told me of his plans for renovation of that house and several others he was thinking about purchasing, as a down payment on his future. I was drawn to his steadiness. I felt within days of meeting him, the stirring of a quiet love that ran deep. I didn’t fall into it as much as claim it. I could tell Joe everything and I wasn’t judged. When I told him about the sessions with the therapist and my love demons he just kissed me and said “The next time you talk to that therapist you tell her thank you from me for getting you ready to me my wife.”We felt married from the start, our connection was that soothing and so right. As I lay nestled in Joe’s arms one evening, I asked him if he had ever thought seriously about marriage. “To whom?” he asked. “To me,” I said. He said “yes” with a certainty that didn’t surprise me at all. We agreed that if we were still together in a year we would marry. We were and we did.
Then things got interesting, got challenging, and I learned who I had married, who I was willing to become, and what real friendship and real love is made of, how it is tested, and how it survives. Yes we are soul mates but our marriage has not been a fairy tale. My initial intention of being the world’s best stepmom was quickly derailed by teenaged angst and jealousy of me, who my step daughter saw only as a rival for her father’s affection. It took several years for Keesha and me to grow into a relationship of l of affection and trust. I had to learn that Joe wasn’t going to be a “Father Know’s Best” dad to my son Michael, accept that Joe would carve out his own way of being step father, role model and friend, to my sometimes hard headed, difficult son, who was as jealous of Joe as Keesha was of me.
I had to learn that no, I couldn’t shout and scream and stalk out of the room slamming the door behind me in the midst of an argument and expect to make my point. Joe had to learn that with me, the way he said things counted even more than what he said.
But what kept us together through it all that is that we never stopped talking. Ever in touch with his feelings, Joe has never hesitated to let me know when he feels I could have done better by him, or even done better by myself. I have learned that the old adage about never going to bed without making up is a nice aphorism, but that in the real world of marriage, a spouse may need a day or two of quiet, sometimes silent healing to get over or make sense of what was done or what was said.
Then four years into our marriage Joe was diagnosed with non-Hodgkinsons lymphoma, an aggressive and often fatal form of cancer. Having lost both my parents in the space of two years when I was in my twenties, I initially presented the strong invincible face to the world that I had perfected in the wake of numerous personal crises. I was calm and optimistic, telling friends about Joe’s illness, repeating the details of the planned course of treatment, the prognosis, how he was holding up.
And then finally in the shower one morning I wept bitter, scorching tears of anger, cursing fate for giving me the love of my life only to threaten to take him away so soon. I cried in the shower because I didn’t want Joe to see me cry, could not imagine seeking comfort from him when he needed at that moment so much. I sank onto the floor of the shower stall and let the warm water beat down on me, sobbing until I could cry no more. Then I stood up, leaned against the walls of the shower and whispered with a mixture of resolve and faith into the ear of God that no matter what, Joe was going to live. We were going to beat cancer. I had just started loving him and I wasn’t through yet.Joe has sometimes said that the cancer, with its eight months of invasive treatments, chemotherapy and radiation, the weakness, fatigue, and the loss of appetite was a blessing. Like many cancer survivors he credits the disease with increasing his appreciation for life, for helping him gain a real sense of priorities. And the cancer was not just the difficult often debilitating treatment. Cancer, which in a sense we both had ( I had it vicariously, and was a victim of it emotionally) manifested itself in old friends coming back into his life and visiting him for hours in the hospital or at home, sitting by his bed, regaling him with the healing balm of memories and favorite stories. It was five of my sister friends showing up at our house one evening with a weeks’ worth of casseroles they had prepared in order to relive me of the burden of cooking and dealing with Joe’s needs. It was those same friends who volunteered to be with Joe at home on the days I had to commute from our home in suburban Maryland to teach in Richmond, Virginia. Joe and I had no idea we were so loved.
Cancer was me coming upon Joe one day in the bathroom, shrunken down almost to nothing, his head bald, his skin sagging beneath his arms, and at his hips, leaning heavily against the bathroom sink. He looked horrible, yet I stood silently watching him and feeling his vulnerability and his strength and his will to live and in that moment loving him so deeply and so preciously it took my breath away. Cancer taught me how to love my husband in ways no marriage manual, no best friend, not even your mama will tell you how to love.
We survived cancer. Together. And together we have survived Joe’s battle now with diabetes ( sparked by the cancer treatments), a family member’s more than decade long sentence to prison, his father’s death and his mother’s health challenges, our mutual job woes, our children’s bad choices, and some dreams turning into nightmares. We have celebrated and shared our grandchildren, our children’s triumphs, our dreams coming true, Joe’s retirement after thirty years of teaching , the life my writing career has given us, travel all over the world, from Havana to Istanbul, Joe’s re-discovery of his passion for playing the piano, performing and writing music.
This love, this marriage has been a journey. Some roads we made. Others we were forced to tread. This union is nothing like I imagined it would be. It has surpassed all I dared hope for. I’ve learned how good I am. How great love feels and that it does not have to be perfect to be love. I know what it means to have a spouse who is your best friend. We are joined beyond the tatters, the tears, the breaks and the breakdowns. We decided at the beginning and along the way, to make this work. Ours is a love and contentment that we earn and create and perfect every day. Who says there are no happy endings?
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