Aging for Amateurs: Valentine's Day brings out the poetry of aging in love

Aging for Amateurs: Valentine's Day brings out the poetry of aging in love 
The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC ; by Bert Keller; 2/10/2 
The week of Valentine’s Day breathes love. Many elders have lived through love’s changing seasons consciously, experiencing what an alive, evolving, hazardous and soul-satisfying thing love is. ... In every long love, the emotional part undergoes a change as the stages of life are lived through. Marriage begins like a bonfire that melts and merges us: our togetherness wants no separation. Then it eases into a practical fire for cooking meals and washing dishes — those years of getting up with the baby, balancing the books, taking out the garbage. ... And then in old age ... love is less a feeling alongside other feelings, and more a shared sense of being with the other. My wife calls it “with-ness.” ... What was transactional in an earlier stage has become grace. After retirement I volunteered to do chaplaincy with a local hospice. I recall a moment sitting at the bedside of a 93-year-old man whose memory was erased by Alzheimer’s disease. He was now dying ... His wife, who also had Alzheimer’s and was no longer capable of much conversation, sat in a wheelchair by his bed and held his hand. She kept repeating to me, tears flowing, “We’ve been married for 73 years, you know.” It was a kind of mantra. How could I know what it’s like to be at the deathbed of a partner with whom you’ve intimately shared 73 years of life? All the stories, all the peaks and valleys, of such a lifetime? ... 
Editor's note: May we listen and learn.