30 years ago today, my sister Robyn and I stood alongside our father and the love of his life, Pat as they exchanged wedding vows in a field by the water’s edge in the tiny little coastal village of Castine, Maine. Pat was only 30 years old, which is amazing to me now, looking back. She seemed so grown up to me then..it’s crazy that even Dad, who was 43 at the time was younger than I am now. Now THAT makes me feel old. To clarify, our mother Connie passed away in 2003, and there’s not enough Valium in the world to get me to write about that, but the fact remains that she is gone. Pat has been a friend, a mother and an ally for every one of these 30 years and she is very much Mom to me, in my heart as well as in name. Dad and Mom have a relationship that I can only hope to aspire to. They are one person in two bodies. They are both scary smart, hysterically funny and either one would kill anyone who looked cross-eyed at the other (or at any of us kids). Loyal, rock solid, two halves of a whole.
A few years back, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and the iron that connects the two of them became even more apparent to me. Mom was fearless (at least she seemed that way to me), Dad was going to drag the both of them and all of us through the hell that Mom had to go through and that was all she wrote. And she was fierce and fearless and a rock star and he changed dressings and drainage tubes and carried her where she needed to go and refused to ever consider that she would have anything other than a 100% recovery with a clean bill of health, which is exactly what she had. Wishing a very happy 30th anniversary to them and wishing all of us a little bit of what they have.
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Photos courtesy of Chrissy Seel.
