There aren’t many people I’m taller than.
My husband’s Aunt Carol, the sister of the woman I call “Mom,” is one of them. She’s maybe 4′ 10″, which means that when I’m around her, I feel tall, if not tall, slim, tanned and blonde.
Aunt Carol ceased being “my husband’s Aunt Carol” approximately 17 minutes after I met her 29 years ago, when I was not-yet-engaged to my pen pal and trying desperately to remember everyone’s name as he coached me on who was who in his sprawling family. I moved to Western Washington in the winter of 1984 so that I could spend time with the man I would marry that Fall. That meant spending time with his cousins, sisters, parents, grandparents, and aunt and uncle. I fell in love with Jeff before I moved to Snohomish; I fell in love with his family shortly thereafter.
So I was delighted when, on our recent trip back to Monroe, I was invited to a ladies Tea Party in honor of Aunt Carol’s 80th birthday. We all dressed up, wore silly, floppy hats, met at an authentic British Tea House in Bothell, and celebrated not just the birthday, but the life, of this remarkable, indefatigably faithful, astonishingly life-loving woman. There were about a dozen of us, and we spent a few hours enjoying the “Elizabeth” menu — an array of pastries enhanced by teas whose names I’d never heard of and the sweet time spent with cousins and old friends we sadly don’t get to see enough. Uncle Gale, currently battling cancer and believing God for its healing, paid for the whole thing, and their daughter Kathy coordinated visitors from three states, all coming to celebrate a woman who, at the start of her ninth decade, truly has her hands full.
But even with the vagaries of life, Carol’s heart is fuller. She’s the matriarch of more than just her three daughters’ families, and she’s more than a grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister. In this woman, with her dancing eyes and honeyed voice, faith in Christ Jesus truly lives.
She had been a born-again believer for a few years before the carpet was pulled out from under her manicured, Southern Idaho farming life. Her youngest daughter was just about to finish high school when Gale left the marriage, leaving her alone with two older daughters in college. He believed he had found something better; she knew he hadn’t. So she committed the recuperation and renewal of her marriage to her Lord and Savior and began to stand for Gale’s return. I can’t imagine the devastation she endured. And, frankly, I can’t imagine having to draw from such deep cisterns of faith in the midst of such profound grief. Her eldest daughter’s Christian college took the restoration of their marriage as a prayer project. Some thought they were unrealistic, maybe a little arrogant. And certainly some thought Carol was, perhaps, a bit more so. After all, some men leave. Some marriages fail. Some women give up and find love elsewhere, if they find love at all.
Carol is not “some women.” She had grown up in a small — no, tiny — town in the Magic Valley, in an area of Southern Idaho that doesn’t immediately announce the discovery of anything particularly magical. She was the eldest daughter of a prosperous farmer and his wife, two people I loved with all my heart. She excelled in crafts and in attracting suitors, and when she married a dashing, baritone-voiced young farm- and trucking worker, she no doubt assumed that her marriage would be as solid as her parents’ — a lasting testimony to fidelity, friendship, and faith.
But life threw her a curve, which came in the form of Gale’s departure and which looked for all the world, I imagine, to be the end — not of her life, maybe, but of her dreams. Carol had had a real encounter with the Lord Jesus, though, that made her hunger for more and believe it could be realized. It would require faith — faith stronger than she knew existed, faith stronger than many thought a simple farm girl capable of. She turned her formidable will not toward healing Gale, or even healing her marriage. She fell to her knees and got up trusting that no man, not even her beloved, could rend asunder what her God had put together. So she acted as though He could do the very thing she most wanted, but couldn’t possibly, on her own, make happen.
And she believed.
Gale came back about year later.
She wore to our tea the dress she and Gale were remarried in, up at the Canadian Bible college daughter Kathy attended, whose student body, in the innocence of faith not yet tarnished by defeat, had stood by Carol as she stood for her marriage. I’ve seen pictures of their second wedding; they both looked radiant, and she looked radiant last weekend. Gale has since been transformed by God into a man unlike any I’ve ever met, a gentle, strong, and sweet man who turned 80 a couple of weeks ago and whose cancer hasn’t chipped away at his faith — his cancer, he says, may or may not be the vehicle that brings him to Jesus’ throne in Heaven, but it’s his beloved wife he’s concerned about. To be any less would be unlike Gale, and to know Gale is to know more about Jesus than you did prior to meeting him.
Age, heartbreak, sickness, and nearly six decades of marriage haven’t stifled the passion, love, and commitment they have for each other. And while I’ve seen some people left infinitely better after the end of their marriage, time spent with Carol and Gale leaves me with no doubt that not only would Gale, as it says in Philemon, “go away for a little while but come back … as a brother,” but that he did so entirely for God’s glory. Even though that’s not what he initially intended, and even though it must have hurt like blazes. But God’s glory and the faith it inspired is what Carol drew on then, and what they both draw from now.
Seeing five-generation pictures of Carol and her mother, daughter, grandson and great-grandbaby reminds me that the branches and limbs of families grow more delicate, more threatened, as they expand further. Drugs, divorce, deceit, depression, declining health and desperate financial situations have plagued her family, as is the case with anyone with more than a couple of living relatives, and that well of faith has been drawn from repeatedly. It never diminishes, and Carol never tires, it seems, of drawing from it. There aren’t storehouses enough to contain what she and Gale have given those around them; their faith isn’t satisfied to rest in the lofty perches of prayer, but wades through the muck and the mire with the hurting and the fallen around them, costing them much and at the same time earning them more.
They won’t realize that greater increase on this earth, I imagine. But when Heaven’s Gate opens for them both — later, I pray, than sooner — the riches of their breathtaking kindnesses will be made evident. Evident to them, two people who, along with Carol’s sister, my “mom,” Shirley, are the kindest, most giving people I’ve ever known, but who give and give constantly with an innocence and un-self-consciousness that drives me to tears more than the gifts themselves.
I may be taller than she is, but in every way that matters, Carol Conner towers over me.