When a preacher looks you and your soon-to-be spouse both square in the eyes and asks if you will take the person standing before you to be your life-long partner and promise to have and to hold them in sickness and in health, it’s pretty easy to utter resounding “I wills!” and “I dos!” Especially when the one to whom you are making those vows is the picture of perfect health.
Picture this: It’s 2008 and at the altar is a 23-year-old bride with an August tan and professionally done hair and makeup. She’s in prime physical form due to a pre-wedding fitness and nutrition crackdown, and she still has the mental capacity to remember to take her vitamins and do yoga stretches every morning. Standing beside her is a 25-year-old groom who actively participates in team sports, has a room in his house dedicated to fitness equipment (that actually gets used), and has a penchant for spinach and salmon.
Fast forward 15 years. Here I sit at our office desk, typing away on this column, with a growing mound of crumpled tissues beginning to obscure my view of the framed photo of those two young, healthy, smiling people in their white gown and tuxedo. As I sip my honey lemon detox tea, I sit back, cough, and think back on what “in sickness” has meant over the course of our decade and a half of marriage.
Maybe I’m pondering both marriage and illness because it’s simultaneously the month of love and the season of sickness, and my household, while always full of love, is also currently experiencing an abundance of the latter.
For my husband and me, taking each other “in sickness” has meant coming home from work to find your new husband curled up on your new couch wrapped in your fuzzy green bathrobe with your cute pink thermometer dangling from his quivering lips, and hearing a barely audible, “Babe, I’m so sick. Can you bring me some Gatorade?”, and realizing that you are, for the first of many, many times, up against the worst of all the Earthly ailments … the “Man Cold.” And the “in sickness” part must also mean that you have to share your favorite bathrobe.
“In sickness” has meant living off Taco Bell, McDonald’s bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits, and cold cantaloupe for nine straight months because that’s all your nauseous pregnant wife can bear to consume, without a word of complaint (since you’re partly to blame for this, after all). It’s meant volunteering to be the chief operating officer of the NoseFrida “snotsucker” device because your congested newborn’s respiratory health depends on it and your wife is too grossed out by the concept of using her mouth to suck the contents of your baby’s nose out through a thin plastic tube despite the patented no-parental-contact-with-mucus “hygiene filter.”
“In sickness” has meant taking turns getting up every two hours to rock a toddler with perpetual ear infections back to sleep and tag-teaming against said toddler in a wrestling match to administer ear drops and yucky antibiotics. It has meant simultaneously jolting from bed at the sound of dry heaving from the other room; after 10 years of parenthood, we have the whole “kid puking in the middle of the night” thing down to a science. He grabs the carpet cleaner and strips the sheets while I change the pj’s, take the temperature, and pour the Pedialyte.
“In sickness” has meant flying home hours after landing for a long-planned, much-anticipated Arizona golf trip with your best friends because your wife has just come down with Covid-19 and is too sick to care for herself, much less your children. It’s meant countless other foiled vacation plans, canceled date nights, absences from family holiday get-togethers, and days of missed work because someone has tested positive for one of the multitude of viruses that seems to love to incubate in elementary school classrooms. It’s meant all four of us coming down with Norovirus at the same time and living to tell the tale. It’s meant achieving the ultimate family trifecta of Covid-19 for Thanksgiving, Flu A for Christmas, and Flu B for New Year. It’s also been the little things in between the big bugs, like me buying him one of those daily pill organizers so that he doesn’t forget to take his cholesterol medication or his multi-vitamin, and him bringing me a packet of Emergen-C for my water when he starts to sniffle.
“In sickness” has meant both of us being able to laugh after he says, “Wow, that’s sexy” as he witnesses my nighttime routine of blowing my nose after a vigorous sinus rinse, shooting Flonase up my nostrils, and puffing my inhaler, and I reply with, “Yeah? Well, so is your snoring.”
But what “in sickness” has not meant for us in our marriage is one of us facing a serious illness, and we do not take this for granted. We have watched so many of our brave friends and family members stand by their partners in true sickness and have marveled at the amount of strength and love that it takes to uphold that marriage vow. During this month of love, if you are dealing with tissues and DayQuil, trash cans, and Zofran, or even ports and chemo, let the ones who love you take care of you. They made you a promise, after all.
And to my darling husband, I’d like to offer a small edit of those vows I made 15 years ago, “I, Claire, take you, Corey, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward … in health and especially in sickness.”
You may want to wait until springtime to kiss the bride.
