My beloved wife is about to retire and I'm scared witless. I exaggerate, but since I retired 11 years ago I've become used to doing things pretty much on my own schedule and enjoying a certain amount of solitude. I fear things will change.
Becky, my wife, and I do enjoy the times when it's just the two of us. (We were tested last year at a lonely beach house rocked day after day by a cold wind. We put up a brave front until Wednesday when Becky asked diffidently, "Do you suppose we could leave Friday instead of Saturday?")
Our times together are often adventures in discovery, in travel and in hilarity. For instance, we had not been married many years when I planned a little surprise for her birthday. I would drive her to Bardstown where we would take the dinner train on Friday night and then stay over at the Talbot Tavern. We checked in at the tavern then drove to the dinner train. The train was there, but unlit and no one was around. Nor did anyone come. At last we gave up and returned to the tavern. Over dinner Becky had a confession: while I was away in Cincinnati the dinner train people called and left a message that the Friday night run had been canceled. She didn't tell me because she didn't want to spoil my surprise.
A few times a year something starts Becky laughing uncontrollably. Once it was a company's TV commercial bragging that they were the official pest control company for the Knoxville World's Fair. Often these guffaws of laughter happen during movies. There's nothing to be done; one must just wait until she's exhausted. Or join in, which is more fun.
Becky likes to be busy, do things. I, on the other hand, am able to do nothing for hours and be perfectly happy. And I would be happiest to do nothing in her company, but her nature and habits work against that. Probably I'm concerned for nothing; she will most likely take a few days off in retirement and start looking for something else to do.
The first year we were married she went to work for the Kentucky Council on Higher Education in Frankfort and over her years there assumed more and more responsibility. At some point she began volunteering in the St. Joseph Hospital emergency room at night. She was feeling a call to move on to work that involved caring for people. Becky considered nursing-her friend had become a nurse after retiring as a teacher-but decided on social work. She quit the council job and worked as a doctor's receptionist while she took night classes for a master's degree.
During that time her aging parents moved back to Lexington from Florida. Along with her job and school work she cared for them. Her father died within a year and her mother died the next year. The funeral was a few days before we were to leave for Montreal where I was to have surgery and needed her support. She did it all and did it well. She's tough; she's also tender-hearted.
Becky is a licensed clinical social worker. For 10 years she has been a therapist with the Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center counseling survivors of childhood sexual abuse. And like others at the center she has taken her turn being on call after hours, sometimes going to the hospital in the deep night to be available to a rape victim. The work has been rewarding but very demanding. Many times I could read in her face what the day had cost her.
But she is resilient and always ready to do more. When an airliner crashed at the Lexington airport killing 49 people, she was there as a Red Cross volunteer to help the families of the dead. After 9/11 she was a Red Cross worker helping people in lower Manhattan get their lives in order.
The Red Cross sent her to Montgomery, Ala., after Katrina to debrief and help field workers deal with what they had experienced. From e-mails: "The stories I hear are heartbreaking and my heart goes out to the volunteers who have borne witness to the devastation, especially in Mississippi," and "I miss you all, but absolutely love what I am doing."
Becky's faith moves her to do what she does, and whatever work she takes up after retirement, someone's life will be better because it has been touched by hers.
Becky's undergraduate degree is in music. She sings, and when she sings it comes from the soul. Her favorite hymn ends: "I'll praise him while he lends me breath; and when my voice is lost in death, praise shall employ my nobler powers. My days of praise shall ne'er be past while life and thought and being last, or immortality endures."