The Day Jan and I Married!
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes, 58 secondsLove Never Dies
Today, August 9, 2022, is forty-seven years since Jan and I married. The memories not only of that day but every day and night of our lives are technicolor movies that play on a loop in my mind. As she said in her vows, our love will last as long as “both of us possess life.” I knew before meeting Jan that true love would never die. In the fifteen months, I have lived alone, that truth is more self-evident than ever.
Our wedding was only one day of thousands, but it was the time and place where we announced our love and commitment to family and friends.
The highest honor of my life was and always will be Jan’s husband.
As her husband, I was her caretaker for the last nineteen months of her life. Until Jan’s final breath, I believed she would live a long and healthy life.
Every day I wake up and ask God why Jan and I could not have had another day, week, or month together.
But I know our love will never die, and Jan will always be with me.
I will match all donations made this month to The Jan Lilien Education Fund to honor Jan and the memory of our wedding.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. All donations are tax-deductible.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
After almost 48 years, I recently lost my wife, Jan Lilien. Like The Little Prince, Jan and I believed that “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” This blog is a collection of my random thoughts on love, grief, life, and all things considered.
What a great story as well as funny…You described the wedding as if it happened yesterday!!
Hugo, thank you very much for commenting on The Day Jan and I Married.
In my mind, the day Jan and I married was, in fact, yesterday. It was an essential public statement to family and friends that the love Jan and I shared was not an infatuation but a long-term commitment. Jan’s love transformed me and made me a better person.
Like life itself, love can be fragile. When I write about our early days, I must accept that our love and marriage might not have happened.
My commitment to my imaginary girlfriend kept me from pursuing Jan even though I felt a strong and unique attraction to Jan when I met her at the December 1972 VISTA Training.
Jan could have decided that her parent’s opposition was enough to convince her not to marry me.
Jan might have had a boyfriend when I went to her party, and I would have only a casual friend.
If any of those had occurred, I might have been a lifelong bachelor, or perhaps the imaginary girlfriend would not have left me.
As I wrote, the highest honor of my life was and always will be being Jan’s husband. Love never dies, and my passion for Jan will never end.
The amateur writing I do comes from my heart and soul and flows thru my fingers like the tides in the Bay of Fundy.
Hugo, I would write more often if I had more readers like you.
I appreciate your friendship and support during the most challenging chapter of my life.