My wife, Kathi, and I watched “Skylark” recently. It’s the sequel to “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” It may strike some as jarring, but when Jacob joins his wife, Sarah, at her former home on the coast of Maine after a lengthy separation and she speaks of her love for him as “terrible,” I understand. The cool greenness of New England no longer satisfies her in quite the same way because the object of her “terrible” love she has left behind in Kansas.
Yes–Maine, in some ways, is everything that hot, dry Kansas is not, but no love of place can replace the affection she feels for her midwest farmer husband. If their creator, novelist Patricia McLaughlan, was not familiar with the words of Song of Solomon 8:6, “Love is strong as death; passion fierce as the grave,” she certainly captures poignantly the author’s meaning.
There is a scene in “Shadowlands” when, after only a few years of marriage, Joy Davidman and husband C.S. Lewis face the inevitability of her (imminent) death and the grief he will have to endure when that moment arrives, she helps him put it all into perspective: “The pain then is part of the happiness now. That’s the deal.” She spoke wisely. After her death Lewis would write, “It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.”
If my beloved wife should precede me in death, I trust that in the pain then I shall be able to thank God for the happiness now. Tennyson famously wrote, “I hold it true whate’er befall/ I feel it when I sorrow most/ Tis better to have loved and lost/ than never to have loved at all.” To that, dear Kathi, I can only say a hearty “amen.” But there is also this: when both husband and wife are in Christ, a whole new dimension is added to the discussion. For Christians never say good-bye for the last time.
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