A Very Lucky Man

2021
I’ve had many friends tell me how unlucky I’ve been to have lost not one but two wives, one to cancer and the other to Alzheimer’s Disease. To the contrary; I feel like Lou Gehrig, “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth,” standing at home plate in Yankee Stadium and addressing the sellout crowd back in 1939. I’m a very lucky man to have been married to not one but two of the most wonderful wives a husband could imagine. Ruth and Vicki were two of the kindest, gentlest, and most generous souls I’ve ever known – not a malicious bone in their bodies – and I feel extremely fortunate to have been married to them for a cumulative total of 47 years. How many husbands can say that?
I married Ruth back in 1972 when I was 24 and she was 45. Older women weren’t called cougars back then, and there was nothing predatory about Ruth. She was the love of my life. It wasn’t easy for her to marry me. May-December marriages were always okay for younger women and older men, but December-May marriages were almost scandalous. While my generation had an open mind about such things, most of Ruth’s friends deserted her. My mother, living 3,000 miles away in California, wrote a scathing letter to me denouncing Ruth and insisting she had to be “insane to want to marry a boy.” She changed her opinion when she finally met Ruth … or at least she pretended to change it. But because of her initial judgment I could never forgive her for her cruel words, and my mother and I barely spoke until after Ruth had passed away from ovarian cancer in 1986. Even then my relationship with my mother remained fragile right up until the day she died, although she and Vicki got along famously.
Ruth, a German war bride who had divorced her abusive husband, opened up new vistas for me. She was cultured, bright, educated, and well-read. She introduced me to baroque and classical music, operas, ballet, and the fine arts. She played the piano and learned to play the recorder after she became interested in medieval music. She was a classy lady in every sense of the word. We had met when I was still studying history at Lowell State College (now UMass Lowell), and I was fascinated by someone who had grown up in Nazi Germany. We traveled to Germany to visit her family and tour Europe 19 times in the 14 years we were married. I learned far more from her than she did from me, but she had an open mind and was receptive to new things and ideas. She even grew to like The Beatles and other rock’n’roll bands from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Given our age difference I had expected to outlive Ruth. I didn’t anticipate losing her so soon. Ruth died in my arms at home early on a Saturday morning on March 1, 1986, just a few days short of her 59th birthday. She wanted her ashes buried in the German village where she had been born and grown up, and that summer her two daughters and I made one last trip “home” to carry out her wish. I have been back to Germany only twice since then, both times with Vicki, and I visited her well-kept grave each time. Vicki didn’t mind. I expect to go back when this pandemic is behind us, and I will again spend a little time visiting with the love of my life.
I met Vicki while covering spring training for the Red Sox in Winter Haven, Florida, a year after Ruth passed away. We hit it off right away and were married the following January. I loved the name Victoria, but she didn’t and preferred to be called Vicki. Except for their basic natures, Vicki and Ruth didn’t have a lot in common. Vicki, who was only four months older than I instead of 21 years, was more into arts and crafts, Broadway musicals, and films from the 1940s. But she enjoyed rock’n’roll as much as I did, and we went to rock concerts whenever our busy schedules permitted it. Vicki, twice divorced, was 40 when we married. She never had children, and it was too late in life for us to start a family. But we did host several foreign exchange students, three of whom we remained close to and who still consider us as their “American parents.” One of them, a Bulgarian teen, we think of as our own son. Asen was supposed to stay with us for one year and ended up staying seven. We helped put him through Washington College in Maryland where he graduated magna cum laude with degrees in International Affairs, Economics, and German. He already spoke five languages when he came to us and quickly learned Spanish when he fell in love with a girl at college and took a university teaching job in Ecuador, her home country. Vicki and I attended their wedding in Quito, and it was one of the most memorable vacations of our lives. Asen, 46 next month, and Milly live in Vancouver, Canada, now.
A few years after Vicki and I were married, she decided to go to college. I was so proud of her for enrolling in her mid-40s and sticking it out for 16 years of night school, graduating Phi Theta Kappa from Middlesex Community College and then earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Merrimack College.
We were so looking forward to retiring and spending the winter months at our condo in Florida for the rest of our lives. But by the time Vicki retired, it was obvious something wasn’t quite right. For the next nine years she battled Alzheimer’s. It was extremely difficult watching a woman I loved slowly devolve into the shell of the wonderful, vibrant person I once knew. I was her sole caregiver for the first six years until she became too difficult for me to handle and I had to put her in an assisted living facility. It was merciful when she finally passed on April 20. This winter I will fulfill her final wish by scattering her ashes in the Gulf of Mexico behind our condo.
No one in a happy marriage wants to lose one wife, much less two, to an untimely and ugly death. But I am a lucky man, and I can console myself with the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
I miss them both.