10. The Heart Still Know
Today is 30 days from the first anniversary of Dad’s passing. I’ve committed to writing 40 stories about him as that day approaches. Forty Steady Stories.
If you didn’t know my dad, you might think what I’ll write below is an exaggeration or hyperbole. I assure you it is not. Not one bit.
It’s one of two things that both my brothers and I separately talked about at Dad’s funeral — even though we didn’t tell each other beforehand what we were going to say. It was the second most constant refrain that he sung his entire life with every fiber of his being — the other being his faith. It marked his life from the moment he met her until he took his very last breath with her beside him.
It is the way that my dad loved my mom.
Some of you may have seen the movie, The Notebook. I watched a real-life version of that movie my whole life in the way Dad and Mom loved each other.
He told me more than once the story of the moment he saw her in the summer of 1961 at an SAE rush party in Charlotte. He said to his friends, “I’ve got to have a date with that girl.” He went back home to Bristol and immediately told his mom, “I found the girl I’m gonna marry.” Three years later, he did just that. He told that story often because it was as real to him in his 70s as it was when it happened some 55 years earlier, even though he couldn’t remember the details as well the last several years due to dementia.
Dad talked all the time about how falling in love with Mom changed his life forever, and he showed it every day. He opened the door for her everywhere and every time. He pulled out her chair for her to sit, and he stood up whenever she walked in the room — even after all the knee and hip surgeries. We heard him say that he loved her every single day of our lives. Every. Single. Day.
About 25 years ago, Dad and I were driving together, and he was talking about Mom. He said something I’ll never forget, even though it was a passing comment for him. He said, “Even if I hadn’t married her, I would have wanted to know her just to watch her live her life.” Wow. I tucked that one away in my heart.
When Dad began to get sick, the one thing he kept telling my brothers and me was to make sure we took care of Mom. We promised we would. Toward the end of his life when the words were harder to come by, countless times I saw him pull her hand — which he was already holding — toward himself. Then he would gently kiss her hand and smile at her (like the photo above from December 2019). He did it right up until the end last December.
After he couldn’t really talk much, I realized I didn’t need to hear him say, “I love you.” I could see it in his eyes when he looked at us. I could see it when he looked at our mom. And he looked at her ALL THE TIME toward the end.
Mom shared a quote with me from a book she read that sums it all up better than I could. In the book, a simple, country girl said this:
“What the mind don’t ‘member, the heart still know. Love, the strongest thang of all. Stronger than all the rest. The heart still know. It still know who it loves.”1
Dad loved my mom better than any man I’ve ever seen has loved his spouse. That’s a legacy he left all of us, for which I am sincerely eternally grateful. He lived it out daily, and he spoke about it plainly to all. And when he could no longer speak, we knew that “the heart still know.”
1 Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
