Long love and constant spirits: an interview with Richard and Charlee Wilbur - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Jeffrey S. Cramer

CW: We're surely not the same as we were in our twenties. Also, in what is seen as, in quotes, "a happy marriage," there exists hard work. We both are stubborn and somewhat competitive. We clash periodically but we do manage to come back together with renewed force. Silliness and laughter help.

RW: There is new, as it were, subject matter for us all the time. I mean, just to be grisly about it: until the last couple of years we never had to join forces against arthritis. We're both having what we always heard called "aches and pains" and we find that they are real. It changes your life. And so our existences are different now.

CW: In the merging process of marriage one hopes to advance to greater trust so that exposure of weakness may not be so painful.

To characterize their lives together, Richard turns to another poet.

RW: Do you know Robert Frost's poem, "Meeting and Passing"? Well, I think that's what a long marriage is like: people are drawn together, they meet and they pass, and they go back into what there was of each other's pasts. I guess you were about seventeen or so when I first met you?

CW: Eighteen.

RW: Yes, but I'm now very familiar with your earlier years. I really feel as if I were connected to the little girl who was growing up on the island of Capri, and I've groped my way happily into your past as you have into mine. Of course, your knowing my past was facilitated by the fact that you lived with my parents during World War II.

CW: And they became my parents. My mother felt huge love for Dick. He was the son she never had. I was taken in when he was in the Army by his parents and had Ellen in their house. I was there over two years. Dad--Dick's father--was my true father. I lost mine when I was ten. By way of that second parenthood I've entered into a connection within Dick's family given to me by both his parents ... But we also both know everything we did as children. We both know what kinds of fantasies we had. We even speak words of a language that I made up as a child. Dick knows the language and understands me when I speak words from it. We are brother and sister pals at times.

Sharing your life with one person for more than half-a-century brings about change: shifts of priorities, shifts of sentiment, shifts of perception. Depending on your philosophy, those variations may be welcome or undesirable.

RW: It's a very happy thing to find oneself becoming warmer-hearted as one grows older. That can happen, unless one is completely distracted by illness and incapacity into self-pity, self-absorption. If you're not distracted into self-absorption, you do become more vulnerable and more affectionate, I think. At any rate, I feel that happening in me, and I think that that's something made possible for me by this long marriage. Another thing that happens, of course, is the great dread of separation which, for me--living without Charlee is not at all possible to imagine. I suppose I would cope, but I can't begin to imagine it. So there's a painful aspect to it, too. Every day, at the age of seventy-eight, I'm aware that our marriage might end.