Читать книгу Walk With Me, Jesus: A Widow's Journey - Ronda Chervin Ph.D. - Страница 7

You have sent me misery and hardship,

but you will give me life again,

you will pull me up again from the depths of the earth,

prolong my old age, and once more comfort me.

Psalm 71:20-21

(The Jerusalem Bible)

I became a widow on October 9, 1993. I was fifty-six when my husband, Martin Chervin, died suddenly of cardiac arrest. He was seventy-four. At the time we were living in Woodland Hills, California, in an extended family home with one of my twin daughters, Carla; her husband, Peter; and two of our little grandsons, Nicholas and Alexander.

The prospect of becoming a widow was not new to me. After all, I had married a man nearly twenty years my senior; early in our marriage I had acknowledged the possibility that I might be a widow one day. However, Martin was a man with incredible vitality and joie de vivre. We always joked that, compared to him, I was the oldster because of my sedentary, professorial lifestyle.

Unfortunately, the reality was very different. Only a few years after our marriage in 1962, my husband developed a serious form of asthma. By 1968 he was semi-disabled. He could no longer devote himself to his work as an international book salesman; instead he spent the better part of each day writing original plays such as Born/Unborn (a pro-life play about the evils of abortion), Myself: Alma Mahler (a one-woman show about the marriage of Alma and Gustav Mahler), and his recently published masterpiece, Children of the Breath (about the dialogue of Christ and Satan in the desert). Because my husband was too ill to support the family, I worked full-time as a professor of Catholic philosophy. I loved my work, and expected to continue it in one form or another until my own death.

FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

In what ways were you and your husband complementary to each other? (Did your gifts correspond to his weaknesses, and vice versa?)

In what ways were you and your husband truly "partners"?

How have you experienced the truth of this passage from Psalms? "You have sent me misery and hardship, but You will give me life again, You will pull me up again from the depths of the earth, prolong my old age, and once more comfort me."