Personal Voice

Sign up for Meridian’s Free Newsletter, please CLICK HERE

We kneel across the altar from each other. I see her face; how different it is now. It’s more familiar to me than any other. I know that face everywhere and anywhere. Friends say she looks the same as she did when we met, but I know better. I’ve watched her almost every day for two decades. I like the way her features age, even as I know how fragile our bodies are. These bodies have forbidden us to forget their transience. I know that as I hold her hand across the altar.

We are getting ritually married in a Mormon temple on behalf of a couple from seventeenth-century Europe whose French-sounding names the kindly old man, the “sealer,” can barely pronounce. One of them he spells instead of speaking, in weary frustration.

I remember two decades ago, when we knelt across a similar altar for our own Mormon wedding. I don’t remember much of our first time at the altar other than my overwhelming fear. I couldn’t bear the thought then of getting married, but I loved her and wanted to be with her. The first year of marriage was as miserable as you’d expect based on a groom who almost fainted from fear, dithering about whether to flee his own wedding. (She had her own serious reservations that day, she likes to remind me. Several of her friends were astonished that we finished the ceremony without getting the paramedics involved. We were both as grey as wet paper.)

It took years for us to find our rhythm together. I was arrogant and distant and thought domestic work was beneath me. I did “important” things instead. After a few childless years, we had three daughters. Parenthood was typically hard. We had lovely and beloved children and the usual temporal stressors peculiar to that phase of life. We had our squabbles and petty resentments, exhaustion—about what you’d expect from modern parenting with a half-committed husband. Sometimes that life stretched us dangerously thin.

Now we are sealing a child to parents, an analogue to marriage that binds children to parents for eternity. An older man from the neighborhood drapes his hand over ours, his skin wrinkled and his thumb joint bent by advanced arthritis. He smiles, earnest and hopeful. I can see in his face that this is serious business. With our bodies serving as ritual objects, a man is bound to his parents in eternity. He too lived in seventeenth-century Europe. These are the people whose stories are twisting around and about ours.

I love this moment. I cherish the idea that we are connected and connecting. I admire the loose skin covering this older brother’s deforming joints. I appreciate that the generations have been reversed as a man older than our parents is standing in for a son lost to the centuries. I treasure the fact that she and I have been allowed to grow decades older together and that I have become her helpmeet. It’s hard work, sometimes desperate work. Tears of sadness, frustration, or pain still splash our cheeks occasionally. We have consecrated the work, the sadness, and the sanctity to being and growing together.

I’ve never been good about wearing my wedding ring. The original one was a gold alloy band from the 1960s, the remnant of my mother-in-law’s failed marriage. She divorced the father-in-law I never met for sleeping with his secretary. My wife was six weeks old at the time. There’s no time like pregnancy, I suppose, for adultery. If one must betray, one may as well do it horrifically. He took his own life a decade or so later. I wonder sometimes whether he remembered that band, that daughter, in his final moments. I realize now that my biological father’s infidelity was another gruesome tale that ended in premature death. Maybe those two tragic men and their deformed lives explained in part why I was once reluctant to marry my favorite person in the world.

I’ve historically been frugal and unsentimental, accustomed to life in or near poverty. I found the prospect of a free wedding band irresistible. But the alloy irritated my skin. After twelve hours of wearing it, the skin at the base of my ring finger would peel as if after a sunburn. It didn’t help that I despise jewelry in general. Two or three attempts to wear a watch had ended in the waste of fifty dollars or so. I didn’t wear that dead man’s gold band often. Mostly I wore it when I traveled, having heard the stories about the casual dalliances of businessmen on the road. I wanted no part of that sordid ribaldry. My daughter bought me a tiny sarcophagus at an Egyptian exhibit once, and I used that odd relic as a storage box for the ring when I was giving my finger one of its many breaks.

In the event, the sarcophagus lost its contents in a hotel somewhere in Philadelphia, nineteen years into our marriage. I suspect it fell into a crack somewhere when the sarcophagus tipped over. Or perhaps one of the cleaning staff appropriated it. Whatever the cause, the ring was gone. It had joined our fathers in a realm of lost things.

I immediately felt like I was a living cliché, a middle-aged man who had lost his wedding ring in a hotel. It was, no less, the wedding ring given by a man who had an affair while his wife was pregnant with their first child. I hated the bulk of it on my hand and the rash when I wore it. But I needed to replace the band, to start a new story. Modest searching and a willingness to annoy a “sales ambassador” resulted in a 3mm titanium ring that fit my finger well. It cost less than a cheap watch, and it glistened on my hand.

The new ring is a day old. It rests, nervous, on my finger as she and I hold hands across the altar. The scrap of titanium is cheap but clean. This tiny object tells me that I have made peace with our peers and ancestors who have used similar rings to indicate publicly to whom they are bound. I’m giddy with this ring, in this temple, at this altar. It’s as if we got reengaged and remarried in the space of a day. This time I am giving her my whole heart. My soul belongs to us here, as we inhabit eternity. This is my promise; this is my faith.