To My Parents

I’m interrupting our regular programming with a very simple message: Happy Anniversary!!!

Sixty-five years ago today, on April 12, 1958, my parents, Colin and Joan Thompson (née Woodall), were married in Niagara Fall, Ontario, Canada. My father was 23 when he met my mother, and she was 21. They married two years later.

On that special day they took each other’s hands, looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and took a solemn vow to have and to hold the other from that day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and to love and cherish each other.

That they said, that they meant, and that they did.

From that day forward until today, they have held each other; they have lived through better and worse days; they have been both richer and poorer; they have been together in sickness and health; and, above all else, they have loved and cherished each other.

It is a great blessing to me and my two brothers that our parents will have lived out the full meaning of their wedding vows. Theirs is a union that is permanent, which means forever. We are grateful beyond measure for their marriage.

What a beautiful thing it is that this one man and this one woman could dedicate the rest of their lives to each other when they were in their mid-twenties, could raise a family together (three sons followed by seven grandchildren, one great grandchild and a second on the way), and could see out their days together in loving care and tender love.

Their marriage is the greatest gift they could have ever given to their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. They gave their progeny a model of what marriage is and should be, and we honor it today.

My parents have lived the best life: simple, quiet, full of laughter and joy, and, most importantly, with each other. Two separate lives took a long journey through life together, and that journey made them insolubly one, which is the greatest gift of marriage.

When I think of my parents’ marriage, I am reminded of John Donne’s beautiful tribute to the meaning of marriage in his poem, “The Good-Morrow.”

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres,

Without sharp north, without declining west?

Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Among the many words my parents shared during their exchange of wedding vows 65 years ago were these: “Till death us do part.” And so it must be. But as long as their marriage is remembered, it lives—and so it will.

My greatest hope is that when they reach their final horizon, when their mortal bond of marriage is finally broken by time, they can end it the way it began: by holding hands, looking into other’s eyes and saying, “I love you!”