Mr. O'Neal's Lesson

Mr. and Mrs. O'Neal were always there. Every Sunday morning. Every Sunday evening. On Wednesday prayer meetings.

Each Sunday School picnic. Each wedding and its reception. At the yearly Memorial Day picnic. Always there. Always together.

I hardly noticed the impact of passing time. Hardly noticed them slowing down. How fast they moved didn't matter. What mattered is that they were there and they were together.

Mr. O'Neal smiled often, and the edges of his eyes crinkled so much that the center of his face seemed a grim with eyebrows. His voice, over the years, moved from booming to quiet, but that smile always let a person know he was happy to see them.

Mrs. O'Neal smiled, too, often and sweetly. However, as her vision blurred during the passing years, she needed to hear your voice before she knew who you were. Her clasped hands around yours were a connection to her heart.

~

Wonderful people, although you wish they'd be the exception to all rules, are not immune to the inevitable end of their time. Mrs. O'Neal, after an illness that was too short, died, leaving Mr. O'Neal alone without his bride for the first time in many years.

The funeral home was a range of sadness that she was gone, joy that she had been with us, and the wish to be a comfort to Mr. O'Neal.

Our small family was there. My husband, our two small daughters, and me. Mr. O'Neal had know my husband since he was a small boy, had seen him grow, work, marry, have children. He knew him well... but didn't know the current situation in our home.

He hadn't known- no one did- that I was running on borrowed time. My husband had told me the past December that he would move out come September. He was leaving, he let me know, because he no longer loved me. That he chose the day of our anniversary to make this proclamation was an extra sour twist.

Despite the impending action, I had kept things to myself. I'd prayed. I'd cleaned. I'd tried to keep the girls happy and quiet. tried to be whatever it was that I wasn't so that he'd stay.

I'd organized a week's trip to an amusement park, then Niagara Falls; I'd hoped the experience of a happy family time would make him change his mind. As I watched our girls tote their Cabbage Patch kids everywhere, I wondered what they'd take from the trip. Would they remember it? Would it be enough once the family disintegrated?

(I see those photos, now, and wonder how I smiled in them. How did the girls color coordinate their outfits and play on the beach? How did we all stay in a two room motel? How did no one ever know I'd cry in the shower every night?)

When we arrived at the funeral home the girls were quiet. They'd liked Mrs. O'Neal and understood why we were there. They hugged Mr. O'Neal, then sat down in chairs at the back of the room while we waited to pay our respects.

"I'm so sorry," I said to him as I kissed his cheek. My husband shook his hand, then Mr. O'Neal said to him "I should have bought the watch."

"Excuse me?" questioned my husband. "The watch?"

Mr. O'Neal explained that his wife's watch stopped working several months ago. It was the kind that needed to be wound each day, and one day that winding didn't keep the hands moving in tune with the time. Several days later it stopped altogether. She said she wanted to replace it.

"I told her that she didn't need a watch anymore," he explained. He knew that she couldn't see the face of the watch so it didn't matter if hers no longer worked. A new watch just wasn't important.

But she had still asked him, every day, for a new watch. And every day he had said no.

Now, here he was, holding my husband's hand, and tears were gathering at the corners of those laughing eyes. "I should have gotten her the watch," he said quietly. "It didn't matter that she couldn't see it. It wasn't anything big. It would have made her happy. And now I can't do anything for her anymore. It was just a watch."

I'm sure we murmured something reassuring along the very true lines that she surely knew that he loved her. Everyone knew that. Not to worry.

Then we went home.

~

That night, after the children went to bed and my husband fell asleep, I sat alone in the basement family room and thought back on the importance of the watch and those regrets that good man carried.

I knew. I knew there would be no watch for me (whatever 'watch' would have meant for us). I knew that my husband, stay or not, wouldn't be troubled about what he would or would not have given to me to make me happy. I knew that me being happy wasn't a burden he carried, and maybe never had been.

I knew, too, that I would always remember the pure sorrow of that good man.

~~~~

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