I read something on the Twitter about love stories a couple of days ago and I can’t remember who posted it but I thought I might share a love story of my own.

My father and mother met when they were twelve years old. They actually might have met when they were eleven years old, since they met in seventh grade and they both are late-year birthdays.

Ten years later, they got married. They were both twenty-one and had never dated anyone else. She was a LPN (do they still make those?) and he was a high school graduate working in the mailroom of a company that I won’t name because they still exist.

Four years later my brother was born.

Three years after that I was born. My father got promoted to a job he had no business having because he never went to college, but somebody noticed that he was really good with numbers, so here we are.

My mother stopped working. My brother was a treasure, but I was a full-time job.

I was a C-section, by the way, so my head was perfect.

Three years later, my sister was born. She had Trisomy-18 and multiple other health problems. She died twenty-eight days later. My grandmother (my father’s mother) told me it was the only time she had seen him cry.

My parents went on to be perfect parents. They were open minded and wonderful and taught me so much about the world, including driving my brother and I across the USA multiple times in a 1976 Dodge Dart.

I’ve seen every tourist trap that exists. My father once drove three hours out of the way just so we could say we’ve been to California.

My mother was forty-four when she got sick.

I thought right up until the end that she would be fine.

She passed away in our kitchen in a hospital bed supplied by Hospice. She was fifty years and three months old. In November of 2020 I was officially older than she was when she passed.

My father became a different person. He was always sad. His mother did his laundry and made him meals. He was a shell of himself.

A couple of years went by. My father called my apartment and asked me to come by the house. I was dreading it. I assumed the worst. Is he sick? Is he dying?

He met me in the same kitchen my mother died in. He told me he wanted to ask me a serious question. I prepared for the worst.

He said, “Would it be okay with you if I went on a date?”

No dad I would rather watch you be miserable for the rest of your life and die alone at the kitchen table with the shepherd’s pie your 90 year old mother made you.

That was sarcasm. I begged him to please go on a date. Do something that isn’t what you’re currently doing. Anything.

So he went on the date.

They’ve been married for twenty-five years.

My eighty year old father has only dated two women in his life, and he married both of them.