Jerry and Carol Joy met when they were kids. He’d drive her around Keokuk during the week, buy her lunch, and he became enamored with her in a very short time. Carol Joy, on the other hand, just really wasn’t that interested in him.
“Carol, I’m going to marry you one day,” He’d say to her. She would smile at him, nod slightly, but she mostly just thought he was goofy as hell. A real good friend, though!
Jerry was drafted by the Army at eighteen and spent a long time driving tanks in Germany. All that time spent in isolation gave him a lot of time to think and mostly, he thought about Carol Joy.
He returned home from the war with scary news. If he didn’t have a wife and a family, the Army would strip him of his rank and he would be thrown in a prison overseas somewhere. When Jerry explained this to Carol Joy, he did it in the form of a question. They were married in September of 1960 and spent fifty solid years together.
My grandma told me this story a hundred-thousand times. When I was a kid, she would laugh with wide-eyes and my grandpa would grin and sip at his coffee. His story, of course, was complete bullshit. There was no prison waiting for my grandpa. There was no rank to be stripped of. He fabricated the entire thing to have her. Looking back, I’m not so sure she ever believed him in the first place.She died this morning.
I am sad, but I am happy that you’re not in that pain anymore. You taught me how to be myself and I would be a fucking drone without you. You deserve so much more than the way you had to go and that makes me so fucking mad. But I won’t hold onto that. I promise. I’m going to remember your love. Every day. And I am going to apply that love. Every day.That’s how you’ll always be here.
This post is so… I have no words. I got chills and my eyes teared up. It’s so sadly beautiful.
That’s a beautiful story. :)
1 year ago