Marriage and Doctor Visits

Whoever came up with those vows about
"in sickness and in health"
must have known a thing or two about life and living.
We took those vows because, being intoxicated with love,
we actually believed keeping them would be easy.
It's easy to make promises when you're in love.
And at first, when love is hot and vows are new,
you find a way,
even amongst grocery lists and loads of laundry and unpaid electric bills,
You find time for kisses.
But sometimes the mundane and routine turns overwhelming,
kisses turn stale, even bitter
and in our case, the long parade of doctors and lab techs began.
Surely it's just hormones they told us,
or anemia,
And they started treatments and recommendations and more labwork to confirm.
And as the overwhelming bits turned to definite chaos,
kisses became another unfinished to-do at the bottom of the list,
Deprioritized after doctor visits and phone calls to the insurance company.
And then they found the tumor
--benign, non-cancerous, yet completely disruptive--
and they agreed on the depression and the anxiety,
and we entered a phase of guess-test-revise prescriptions, until
Today.

When I took those vows, I thought we'd get a good two or maybe three decades of "in health."
We'd get to practice,
bringing soup to bedside over the flu,
and when the time came for whatever the end looks like,
whatever "in sickness" looks like,
we'd be well-rehearsed.
But whoever came up with those vows must have known about people like us,
People who need vows because making promises is easy but keeping them is hard.

That's what I was thinking about today,
watching you rebutton your shirt as the doctor put away his stethoscope,
telling you that everything looked great, telling me it was my turn up on the table.
Whoever came up with those vows must have known that sometimes young people get sick,
and sometimes husband and wife get sick together,
and sometimes love and marriage means being faithful to doctor visits.
I was thankful for the grace in those vows,
because the errands and the bills almost drove us apart,
but these doctor visits put us back together,
Slowly, with each new prescription and therapy,
the doctors taught us how to care, how to be selfless despite great personal suffering, and how to persevere.