A Lifetime to Love

I am always amazed by longtime love. Kevin and Ann were experts. You couldn’t say one without the other. Nor did you want to. Until today. All eyes are on Kevin as he tucks his wife in for the last time and deals with the grief of her funeral and burial. They have been together so long it is hard to imagine a time that they weren’t. You have to go back nearly a half-century and travel the ocean to Ireland. She was born in Newport, County Mayo, the oldest of sixteen. He was the middle child in a brood of five on a farm in the middle of Galway.

They separately set their sights on America and dreams of a better life. Kevin landed in Cleveland at his Aunt Theresa’s, my Grandmother, at age 18. He was the brother that my Mom and her three sisters never had. And I still remember the stories of Ann on the airplane. Tea brews loosely in Ireland, and when the stewardess gave her a tea bag, she opened it in her cup. A rather inauspicious beginning. My Mom had a hand in their first meeting. They had all gone to a dance and she picked out the prettiest girl in the room for Kevin to ask for a dance. And the rest, they say, is history.

I don’t know that I know a couple who has been through so much. They lost their son Kevin from meningitis when he was just three. And then Ann came a few breaths away from death when chicken pox invaded her last pregnancy. The strapping fireman today belies the four pound baby that wasn’t supposed to make it. Kevin had triple by-pass surgery before it was done routinely, and then a few more times for good measure. I’ve lost count of the times he was not supposed to make it. And work did not ever come easy. It is hard to be a construction worker and trucker when you are in and out of the hospital. The last several years have been difficult with illness after illness affecting Ann, and Kevin giving his all to make her well.

And so this scene today: Kevin stands tall in the front pew of Our Lady of Angels church, his daughter Theresa beside him. His four sons support him with their wives and fifteen grandchildren between them. The church is filled with three hundred people, although Kevin always says he doesn’t have any friends. We are here to say good-bye to a lady whose life was not picture perfect, but who left behind a legacy of love.

The cemetery is the hardest. I watch Kevin hold on to his oldest granddaughter, and I am not sure who is holding up whom. Ann’s eyes dance in her granddaughter Ellen’s face, and Ellen is the same age today that Ann was when she first danced with Kevin. The priest finishes his prayers and the funeral director tells everyone to leave. Nobody moves. The air is still and the crowd is hushed. And still nobody moves. Kevin clings to his granddaughter as the crowd starts to disperse. I can’t imagine what it is like to say good-bye to a love like that.