She Asked Him to the Dance

Ask her family for the one story that holds the heart of her, and they will take you back to a young woman on the telephone at work, talking business with a man on the other end of the line. The two of them went back and forth about the market for a good while, until she decided she had heard enough about work and asked him whether he might like to join her at a dance that coming Saturday. He said yes, and that was the spark that started all of it.

It tells you something about her that no list of facts ever could, that when she saw something worth having, she reached for it. She had grown up in a close, working household where both her parents went out to earn a living, so she understood early that a good life was something you built with your hands and your days.

The dance led to a year and a half of courting, a wedding, and a honeymoon road trip that was the first of a great many miles the two of them would share. After one year renting, they bought a house, and she would live in it for more than sixty years. When you hear a number like that, you understand something about how she loved, which was deeply, and for the long haul. Every evening when her husband came through the door there was a kiss to greet him, because that was simply how it worked in that house, and if there was ever trouble, the children never felt the weight of it. The mood at home stayed upbeat, and warm, and steady.

Those children had her full attention. When their son arrived she stepped away from her job and gave herself completely to raising him, and then his little sister, and her children will tell you she was fantastic at it, supportive and helpful and able to run a whole household without ever having to raise her voice. The rule about sport was a simple one and a good one. You could sign up for anything you wanted and try anything at all, but whatever you started, you finished the year.

She held herself to the same rule, driving them everywhere they needed to be and sitting in the stands for all of it. She even took a turn umpiring her son's softball team when he was in his late teens, a job that came to a rather abrupt end the day she took a line drive to the arm. That was the close of the umpiring career, but it was never the close of her showing up, and before long the whole family was showing up together, for road trips south to the sun and north along the coast, rented cottages in the summer, the same family trip every Easter without fail, and more ball games than anyone could count.

Through all of it there was the table. A circle of five couples took turns hosting dinner parties, and she could cook. Her homemade lasagna is still the stuff of legend in that family, and she was making tacos long before anyone thought to give the night a name. On a Sunday everyone might pile into the rec room with the TV trays out to watch the nature programs they loved. The outdoors itself was her husband's department, and the arrangement was a clear one: if you wanted it cooked, you brought it inside to her, and she would take it from there, provided she did not have to meet a single bug along the way.

And she never stopped tending her friendships. The girls she had known since grade school she kept close for a lifetime, still meeting for lunch well into her eighties, with a spreadsheet to keep every date and every person accounted for, and her husband happily came along for the outings. Once a week there was bridge, four ladies around the table, and when it was her turn to host, her daughter would lie down the hall trying to sleep while the laughter carried on late into the night, year after year. In the end she was one of the last still standing in that circle, and that was not luck. It was the reward of a woman who simply never let go of the people she loved.

There were things that were purely hers as well. She bowled five-pin, and she was good at it, good enough to bring home the trophies and the prizes. She read the newspaper and her novels, with a good romance always a safe bet, and there was always music playing on a little stereo in the kitchen while she worked, though the songs of the fifties held the top spot in her heart. Most of all she loved to dance. Her husband was no dancer, but it never mattered, because she was good enough for the both of them and made the pair of them look wonderful out on that floor.

The two of them kept moving together for as long as they could. In what the family calls their teen years they crossed the ocean year after year, loving the journey as much as the arriving, and when their son moved away they made the trip to see him twice a year. A milestone anniversary brought a cruise with the whole family, and years later another one, all of them together once more. In between, some of her favourite times were spent babysitting the grandchildren, especially when it meant slipping out to a movie with them.

When her husband was gone, she carried on for nearly a decade without him, and she did what she had always done, which was to keep going. With her daughter helping in all the practical ways, she stayed in her own home for years more and kept playing her bridge, still one of the last ones remaining in that circle of hers.

When a family gathers to remember someone, they rarely talk about what she achieved. They talk about who did the reaching. A life like hers is not complicated to measure once you know where to look, because it was built on a home she kept for more than sixty years, a marriage she never stopped tending, and friends she never once let go of. Most of all it was built on being the one who picks up the phone, books the lunch and makes the plan, rather than waiting for somebody else to go first.

Who have you been waiting to hear from, and what if this week you were the one who did the asking?

Shared with the family's blessing. Names and places have been left out.

Writing about someone like this? The Life Story eulogy builder is free to use.