May-December Romances

I saw that Diane Keaton-Jack Nicholson movie “Something’s Gotta Give” and about 10 minutes before it ended, I started talking to the TV screen. “You better not take the old guy back, it better not end that way.”

Jack Nicholson is alone on the bridge in Paris and I am just hoping the movie will do something shockingly original and truer to life and leave the sorry bastard there, but noooo! Unbelievable! Diane Keaton dumps the adoring, younger man—who is a doctor!!! And he seems fine with it! In a scene we don’t see because it would be a complete and utter falsehood, Keanu Reeves supposedly tells her he senses she truly loves the old guy and it’s okay to dump him on the spot and run to the man—the man who has not been able to commit to a relationship in 63 years, dates only younger women, and caused Keaton to weep during most of the middle of the movie.

This movie was such stupid trash. A more realistic and uplifting movie about senior love is one of my favorites, a Walter Matthau-Glenda Jackson film called “House Calls.” The widowed doctor Matthau briefly tries dating younger women, but once he meets Jackson, there is no going back. The comedy conflict comes from his being forced to temporarily pretend to be interested in a rich young widow to keep her from suing the hospital and protect his incompetent boss. Jackson is not in on the ruse at first and becomes offended, but Matthau woos her back. Unlike Nicholson, he never had a doubt the older woman was the right one for him.

Part of my shouting at Keaton’s stupid decision may stem from the fact that I’m in a May-December relationship. In fact, I’ve been in two, once as May and now as December. It’s always the better deal for the December person, so my recommendation is go younger.

There is a danger the May person may prove fickle. After 17 years of marriage to someone 13 years older, we just weren’t at the same place when I was 40 and he was 53. My son had left home and I now wanted to do things, a lot of things: move, change careers, something. He didn’t want to do anything. I found other people to do things with, and within a year, he didn’t seem necessary anymore and I no longer cared about him. I doubt he ever really cared about me as a person. I was the facilitator of his situation, not a person he enjoyed being with, otherwise, he might have tried being with me.

He was ill and cranky all the time and I couldn’t foresee how long I’d have to be his nurse and how much of my life I’d have to sacrifice to be his nurse, so I bailed out, giving up my rights to everything. I forfeited my furniture, his insurance, pension, everything. It turned out he only had nine more years before his smoking and drinking turned into fatal cancer, and then it would have been over for me and I would be sitting on a sizable nest egg now. But who can see into the future? And nine years is very long when it's in front of you...not so long at all when it's behind you.

Instead, I spent most of the 1990s on food stamps, racking up credit card debt, working terrible jobs, and trying to learn new skills and get back into a competitive job market on my own. I discovered men my age who were single were single for a very good reason. They were closet homosexuals, or unable to commit to anything, chronic Peter Pans still waiting for Wendy to rescue them, or just unfit for human companionship.

When I was 45, I met a 30-year-old man who was still single due to being a musician, i.e. poor and seldom available for a date on Friday or Saturday, a combination that appeals only to young women who don’t mind sitting alone in a bar every weekend while their date plays music. At first it was just a adventure for me, but month after month, he was still there, as if he were in a relationship, and after a few years, I accepted that we probably were if he thought we were. When I was 50 and he was 35, we got married. We needed some legality. He needed someone to straighten out his finances who wasn’t his mom and I needed a next of kin who wasn’t my son. Check back in 15 years and we’ll see how this is working out. (Update: 2022, still working out.)

There's always the gamble my younger husband will do to me what I did to my older husband. I have to hope he's a better person than I am.

Meanwhile, the movie ends with a happy family scene of Keaton and Nicholson out to dinner with her daughter’s family. Let me write the real ending. Having already had a mild heart attack, Jack’s health declines and Diane becomes his nurse. Then he dies. At most, they have a few short years together, mostly going back and forth to the hospital. Now she’s single again and even older. Meanwhile, Dr. Keanu has married another, smarter old woman. Tough luck, Diane. Listen to me next time I'm yelling at you through the TV screen.

Death in the Family

My father died July 29 of leukemia. He was 84. The doctor gave him three weeks to three months to live and he died two days later. I think, facing a specter of death he could not hold off by any of his usual methods, he just surrendered to it. He managed to cheat death during World War II by always being late to the apocalypse. He arrived in Pearl Harbor days after Dec. 7, 1941, and arrived in Europe days after D-Day. He was with Patton, but far enough behind with the radio repair units to always just miss the battles. His youthful heroes were Charles Atlas and Jack LaLanne. He believed in exercise and eating right. Long before Dr. Atkins, he dismissed what he called “mooshy white bread.” He espoused yogurt and wheat germ. He would stand on his head to improve his circulation. He practiced yoga positions decades before it was fashionable for urban career women. He had no bad habits, didn’t smoke and seldom drank alcohol. He was immensely proud of keeping his hair and maintaining his weight. He continued to take long walks and go to the gym up until a few months before he died. With all that going for him, and all the things he did to ensure his good health, in the end he didn’t make it as long as either of his parents. His father did nothing but watch television during his last 20 years. His mother, who smoked all her life, passed away in her mid-90s of natural causes. After my mother died of complications following a stroke when she was 57, he remarried with 24 years to go in his own life and vigorously maintained his health. A lapsed Catholic who never went to church when I was growing up, a man who feared offering a prayer before a group almost as much as he feared death, he suddenly decided, with the encouragement of his new wife, to become a holy rolling Pentecostal, and they rolled with the best of them I really lost my father when he remarried because his new wife’s family became more his than his biological one. That often happens with remarriages. This newly and enthusiastically religious man was a stranger to me. It seemed so out of character, but he threw himself into it as determinedly as he did good health. If he could not live forever one way, he was going to live forever another way. At the very end, he went from perfect health to a chronic backache to a diagnosis of bone marrow disease that was quickly rescinded. The doctors weren’t sure. Then there was a heart valve replacement and a gall bladder removed in quick succession and nothing was the same after that. I never got another letter after the last one cheerily reporting the doctors had changed their mind about the bone marrow diagnosis. All his time thereafter was spent recovering, which he ultimately did not. His stepdaughter thinks they were actually seeing the beginnings of the leukemia when the bone marrow was suspected and the two operations threw it into high gear. You wonder why he would submit to any surgery at his age if he wasn’t still hoping to buy himself another decade or two. And when, despite all his efforts, he was told he could not, he made a few phone calls to the people he knew would not freak out (not to me, I am relieved to report), said he was at peace with it, took a nap and died. His final gift to me was no funeral I had to attend, although family members are aghast that I passed on the memorial service. He didn’t like funerals or anything to do with dead bodies. He had both my mother and his mother cremated quickly without viewings. My sister drove through the night to arrive in time to see the body before the funeral home cremated it. She declared it “peaceful.” I suppose that was something she needed to do.

While cleaning out my email, I found a letter from my father dated Dec. 3, 2003, eight months before he died. "I have good news," he wrote. "I do not have cancer, praise the Lord. The doctor made a mistake. Yesterday I got the wonderful report. The doctor was sorry for the mistake. The second report said I had myelodysplasia, not multiple myeloma. There is no cure for it, but the doctor said it doesn't need treatment. Some people have it because of old age. He said for me not to worry about it. However, I still need to take my Procrit shot every two weeks to increase my red blood cell count. That's the good news. All our prayers have been answered." He died of leukemia in July, the logical next step to myelodysplasia. After looking it up on the Internet just now, it sure seemed a much more grim condition than his doctor indicated. Was his doctor stupid or just misleading him about a hopeless situation so he'd be happy? His sudden death two days after the leukemia diagnosis really caught us all by surprise.