the questionnaire

I mentioned a few posts ago that I was filling out a questionnaire for a doctoral dissertation for a woman at Drake University. I thought I would go ahead and put some of the stuff here as stories some of you may not know. And feel free to correct any details that are wrong. I have a horrible memory for details. I will post more of the answers as I finish them.


Please share the history of your marriage prior to the diagnosis and illness of your spouse:

Becky and I met in the fall of 1992 when she was a sophmore in college and I was a junior. We were both mathematics majors at Trinity University, and she was taking the statistics sequence with two of my best friends. She also was the roommate of a friend of mine with whom I played sand volleyball three times per week. We were friends for over a year before we started dating – our first date was November 4, 1993, and we were quickly in love. I remember telling my brother Thanksgiving of that year (just three weeks after our first date) that she was the one, and I never again doubted it.

I graduated from college in 1994 and went to graduate school in Chapel Hill, NC while Becky had one more semester to finish her degree, so we had six months of long-distance relationship. We were engaged by then, but too poor to afford a ring, so none of our family seemed to take the engagement seriously. This didn’t bother us as we felt like we were establishing the parameters of our own relationship and the opinions of anyone else didn’t matter much.

Becky graduated in December of 1994, and moved to North Carolina in January, and we had an apartment together there for eight months. We decided that the better place to pursue our degrees was at Florida State, so we moved to Tallahassee in August 1995, and ultimately Becky received her PhD in mathematics from FSU in 2002. We married on December 29, 1997 – we would have married sooner except that her parents were going through a difficult divorce, and frankly we couldn’t trust them to be civil together. Our daughter Katie was born on June 24, 2000, the perfection of our love and life together made into flesh. She was, is, and will always be a living monument to Becky.

I think our marriage was like most. We loved each other deeply, and we were partners in the best sense of the word. We each had things we were better at or enjoyed more and shared responsibilities that way. She paid the bills, for example, but I managed our retirement and investment accounts and did our taxes. I did the lawn work and took out the trash; she cleaned the inside of the house. She also did all the maintenance stuff because I am clueless about that kind of thing.

I wish I had appreciated her more during this time. We were best friends, but each had our own interests. I played bridge and tennis and was out of the house doing that a lot. She made crafts – every member of our families has a blanket she crocheted, or a tablecloth, or something. And our house was always filled with the cross-stitch things she had made as well. I took her for granted more than I should have in those years. Friday night was usually a date night, usually dinner out and a movie, until Katie was born. Then our lives revolved around her, and I mean that pleasantly. Not that it was a gigantic sacrifice. I gave up playing bridge then and she was an amazing mom. She had no ego and could not be embarrassed by Katie. So if she wanted to throw a tantrum on the floor in Walmart, or whatever, Becky would just stand back and laugh. And then Katie realized that tantrums didn’t get her anything, and she quit.

In the summer of 2002, we moved to Nacogdoches, TX, out in the east Texas pine forests. It is a beautiful community, and Becky was the newest assistant math professor at Stephen F. Austin State University and I took a job at a local CPA firm. I had hopes of finishing my PhD, but we picked a town too far from any university with a PhD program in accounting, so I decided to continue working. From the moment we ventured into Nacogdoches on the day of her interview in March, it was home to us. We found a home that chose us as much as we chose it. She was immediately part of a family at SFA in the math department there. Katie was in an amazing daycare and took to it immediately.

And our relationship had never been closer. Becky was doing exactly what she wanted to be doing professionally. She wanted to work with math teachers, not teaching education but teaching mathematics, and there is a federal grant at SFA that does just that and she fit the program perfectly. Of course, the salary jump from graduate student to professor was nice for the family, and we spent the summer doing things responsible parents and people do, purchasing life insurance, writing wills, saving money for retirement and college for Katie, which we had started before but undertook in earnest. We arranged our work schedules so that we were both off one afternoon and we had three or four hours together every week while Katie was in day care, and that was such an amazing blessing to our relationship. I don’t think we were ever closer emotionally, mentally, sexually than we were in that time leading up to her diagnosis.