A Love Story That Began Almost 60 Years Ago

Today, April 2, is the anniversary of my sister Shirley’s wedding. Several days after she died last July, my brother-in-law shared the story of how they came to be together.

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Imagine the year 1962, in a rural town in north-central New York. Three houses keep company with each other, hugged by cornfields and the main road.

Imagine the middle house, a two-story with peeling pink paint and a septic tank buried in the backyard next to the well. Inside the house are four siblings: the youngest (me) at about 5, the boy at 9, the middle sister at 16, and the oldest sister at 19.

Imagine a tall, dark, lanky lad of 19: Alfred, the son of a dairy farmer. He’s come to the pink house to see the oldest sister Char, his date for the evening.

Char is beautiful in a dark, smoldering way. Her face is round and her eyes are dark slits. She’s somehow restless and indolent at the same time. Alfred comes to the door and is greeted by Shirl, the middle sister. It’s the first time he has seen her. Shirl is cute in a perky kind of way. Her face is thin, her eyes bright and shiny.

“She opened the door and smiled. She was so bubbly.” Alfred went out with Char that evening, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Shirl and how she had smiled at him.

“Then later I called the house and she answered. She said, Oh, you want to talk to Char. I said, no, I want to talk to you.”

And so the love story begins when Shirley was just 16.

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I asked my brother-in-law whether my oldest sister was miffed that he chose Shirley over her.

“Oh, no. She had lots of boyfriends.”

I’m sure she did. Char was beautiful and liked to walk the edge of the wild side. Shirley was pretty and liked to follow convention. Alfred was most likely her first and only boyfriend.

I think this is Shirley showing off her engagement ring. The best part of the photo is how happy both of my sisters look.

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Alfred and Shirley married when she was 19 and he was 21. Char was her maid of honor. Alfred’s older brother was his best man. Shirley quickly settled into the life of a dairy farmer’s wife, welcoming two sons within the first couple of years of the marriage and then another son several years later.

With the nursing diploma she earned between high school graduation and her wedding day, Shirley took a job working nights in the maternity ward of a local hospital. She loved babies. She loved to write. Many of those nights, while the babies slept, she wrote letters.

I still have a lot of those letters. Well, actually, now I have scanned copies of them. I sent the originals to Alfred, to read and to keep as long as he wants them.

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A few weeks before Shirley died, she pulled out her high school yearbook. She made Alfred read what he had written on the back page: “I’m so glad you’re my girl.” He tells me that he didn’t remember writing that until she showed it to him.

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I wish I had known their love story, that I could have been more part of it. I was only five or six when they started to date, completely oblivious to anyone’s needs but my own. I don’t remember Alfred taking my sister out. I don’t remember him being in the picture at all until the day of their wedding, that day when I wanted to scream “Don’t go! Don’t leave me!” as she recited her vows.

And then she was gone, but only to another house, just a few miles away. A two-family house they shared with Alfred’s older brother until he divorced, got cancer and died. Some years later, the farm was sold. Alfred couldn’t run it without his older brother, but it’s still in the family and Alfred spends a lot of time there, helping the current owner with upkeep.

Alfred and Shirley kept a few acres of the farm for themselves and built a new one-story house. Ever the handyman and carpenter, Al quietly and steadily worked on their home, adding a front porch where they could sit and watch the occasional car pass by and a screened-in back porch where they could eat when the weather was mild.

Alfred worries that he didn’t hug Shirley enough, or tell her he loved her enough. While she was in the hospital those last few weeks, he visited as often as allowed. He talked to her and hugged her. Sometimes she responded and returned his hug. Sometimes she didn’t. He could never really tell if she understood anything he said.

I try to tell him that none of it would have been enough, no number of hugs or I-love-yous would ease the pain of losing her. That he has to have faith that she knew, she always knew, how deeply he loved her. He has to have faith that her love for him was just as deep as his love for her. They had 59 years together on this earth and were rarely apart from each other. They built so many happy memories together that he can’t remember them all.

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Sometimes the deepest love is unspoken. The deepest love resides in the heart. It will never leave and it will never end.

Love you, Shirley, and miss you, oh, so much.