On the morning of Oct. 25, 2005, our plane will touch down in Santiago, Chile. It will mark the end of a 17-month quest to serve a mission as a “senior couple,” as well as the beginning of a new adventure for both of us.
I share this experience in hopes of informing other couples about “senior” missions, a topic that was a complete mystery to us a year ago, and perhaps spurring other couples to action.
My husband Steve and I, married nearly 36 years now, had had in the back of our minds for years a mission together – at some future time. The future became closer in May 2004, as we were driving back to the Eugene airport from a visit to the beautiful Oregon Coast to celebrate Steve’s 59th birthday. We talked at length about when we could go, and how, about the financial ramifications of taking two years away from work long before he planned to retire from his engineering practice, and the problem of what to do with our home while we were gone. We still had six years on our mortgage and had lived nearly 10 years in the home we’d designed and landscaped ourselves. I couldn’t bear the thought of having someone else live in it, let alone returning to a neglected and possibly dead yard.
The conversation continued as we turned in our rental car and stood in line at the airport check-in counter. Steve had always planned to work until he was 65, then serve a mission – after all the retirement income kicked in. He’d already started selling off his interest in his engineering firm, but that still had five years to go. “The bottom line is,” I remember Steve saying, “I can’t afford to take two years off and still make the house payments.”
My reply is etched in his memory forever: “Then let’s sell the house.” He was stunned.
Moving Forward
Back home the next day, we drove to a twin-home development a mile away but still within our ward boundaries (unusual for Utah) and looked at a home under construction. I’d only been in this section of the ward once before, about three weeks earlier, to attend a book group. I’d looked around at our hostess’s home and thought, “I could live here.” So the day we visited the two-story twin home that was in the framing stages next door, I declared out loud, “I could live here.”
It would require months of work to get rid of rooms full of furniture and the accumulation of years of stuff, but we took a deep breath, put our 6,300-square-foot house up for sale, and signed a contract to buy the one under construction, smaller by more than a third and with exterior maintenance taken care of. We’d be able to pay cash for it, thus eliminating house payments and putting ourselves in a position to serve a mission down the road. Ideally, we’d want to go at the same time our son Rob, who was just turning 18, would be serving. Minus house payments and BYU tuition, we thought we could manage, although we’d have no substantial income while we were serving.
It’s amazing what happens and how things fall into place when you finally decide to do something. Our unspoken mantra was 1 Nephi 3:7, the first scripture I ever memorized as a ninth-grade seminary student. The house sold the end of July, the new one got built (albeit slowly), and we got rid of a lot of things through garage sales and by handing back to our four married kids their stuff, which we’d been storing in our home for years.
Near the end, when we were in the throes of moving in early December and needed to get rid of the rest, we invited neighbors and ward members to come and take whatever they wanted and make a donation to the missionary clothing fund for Guatemala. We accepted clothing donations also and, right in the middle of our move, left for a Thanksgiving trip to Guatemala with six large (donated) suitcases loaded with 40 white shirts, dark pants, belts, ties, women’s clothing in small sizes, shoes, and baseball caps which we delivered to the CCM (MTC in Spanish) adjacent to the temple in Guatemala City. (We never take more than carry-ons for ourselves, so we’re free to use our baggage allowance for humanitarian purposes. We leave it all there, including the suitcases.)
Inspirational Journeys
We did the clearing out and packing all summer, sandwiching in trips we’d planned before deciding to sell our home. Most memorable were visits to Prague, where we ran into several missionaries on the Charles Bridge, on their way to a zone conference; Warsaw, Poland, where a young convert acted as our guide; and Riga, Latvia, where I interviewed the mission president and other local converts for Meridian and Church News articles. We met other missionary couples who were having a wonderful experience in places they’d never dreamed of living, learning languages they’d never dreamed of speaking. And the enthusiasm of the young elders we met rubbed off on Rob.
We returned home with renewed commitment to make the mission happen as we continued the process of sorting, packing and moving.
Comfortably ensconced in our new digs come January and with almost everything unpacked that I intended to unpack, we picked up the missionary applications from our bishop and began making appointments for doctors’ exams and dental work – potentially large expenses that couples need to consider when planning for a mission. (Multiply the usual expenses by three, as we were all getting ready to go at the same time, and you have some idea of the budgeting necessary.)
Inquiring about medical insurance (which my husband could not qualify for because he wouldn’t be employed during our mission), we discovered that the Church sponsors its own missionary medical program for couples – and it costs half what we were currently paying, for the same benefits. That was good news.
I started shopping clearance sales for women’s clothes to build my mix-and-match wardrobe. I would definitely have to augment my ordinarily small one needed only for Sundays, weddings and funerals if I was going to have to wear a skirt six days a week. My husband’s and son’s missionary wardrobes were far simpler – lots of permanent-press white shirts, a few ties, dark pants and suits – and their purchase would be spread out over the next few months as those items went on sale. They each bought a new pair of dress shoes earlier this year, and recently purchased a second as mission time approached.
And there were the grandchildren to consider. We went through the huge inventory of toys and books stockpiled in the furnace room, then wrapped, bagged and labeled birthday and Christmas gifts for each family through 2007. It was a massive undertaking that took a reliable list and several weeks, but it’s taken care of while we’re away, and the kids will know we remember them. Each family took their labeled garbage bags home and will check them as the birthday or holiday nears.
Language Learning
We also signed up for Spanish classes through BYU’s Continuing Education, at the bargain price of $10 for the semester. Steve had never studied a foreign language (his first mission was to the Northern States), so he opted for the beginner class, while I signed up for the intermediate course.
I’d had Spanish in high school 40 years earlier and remembered bits and pieces of it, but it was amazing what came back to me as I met with the Taylors, our super teachers, and other aspiring Spanish speakers two evenings a week.
Brain cells that had lain dormant for decades were re-awakened and the Spanish revived. It’s proved a valuable foundation. My husband seemed lost, but stuck with it because he knew I wanted to serve a Spanish-speaking mission, having lived on the border in El Paso in my youth and having been a volunteer ESL teacher in recent years. Right off, I taught him to answer “Cuantos años tiene?” (“How old are you?”) with the Spanish equivalent of “I’m 60, but my wife is much younger.” (He still has trouble remembering the six-word phrase.)
When he wasn’t making much progress, others told us how difficult it is to learn a language if you haven’t been exposed to it in youth; in fact, that’s why the MTC stopped keeping couples for the eight-week language instruction: It just wasn’t working. They also assured us that if one member of the couple could speak the language, they’d survive. I told Steve that the language would surely come more easily when he wasn’t focused on work 60 hours a week and could make room in his brain for something totally different from engineering.
Small Miracle
We filled out the papers, made the medical and dental visits and got the needed signatures, and started getting the required shots (which also add up at around $50 each, with a series required for each person). Then about mid-February, our only daughter (we have four sons) informed us she was pregnant with their second child – and it was due Oct. 1. As they had had trouble previously conceiving and were about to start fertility treatments again when Kristin discovered she was pregnant, we consider this one of the miracles of our mission – and we hadn’t even left yet!
We wanted to stick around long enough to hold the new baby and to help Kristin after the baby came. We put an availability date of Oct. 10 on our papers, and Rob put Oct. 1 on his. We added a letter with both sets of papers noting that we all needed to leave about the same time, preferably with Rob going ahead of us so he wouldn’t have to ride his bike to the MTC and so we’d get home a little ahead of him. Since couples can serve a maximum of 23 months, the timing was critical.
We also sent an email to President Lon Packard of the Santiago West Mission, whose wife had been in my book group for several years. They’d been in Chile since July 2004, serving as mission president, and I’d mentioned to Debra that we were thinking about a mission in 2005. “Let us know when you’re ready,” they told us, so we did.
(The conclusion of this informative article will post tomorrow.)
