Thirty Years: A Road Not Traveled

Monday, July 13, 2026, my wife and I will celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary. It looks to be a hot day here in northern Oklahoma, not all that different than the afternoon in Austin, Texas, when we pledged ourselves to each other with a matching pair of “I do’s,” forsaking all others, and to love, honor and cherish (and, for Laura, to obey – thanks Uncle Bill) through sickness and health ‘til death do us part.

We’ve done a few things that my parents never got to do. We have seen the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. We’ve stood on Colorado mountains and in Death Valley, California. I own a collection of woodworking tools that Dad would either be jealous of, or shake his head in disbelief that I bought such things. I found their will from 1978, where they named two items, specifically, to be distributed as inheritance: a shotgun, to be given to Dad’s youngest brother, and an antique kitchen table, to be given to Mom’s brother. That was all – and not even to be left to us kids! If we were to name specific things to our kids, it would be considerably more than two relatively minor things. My wife’s James Avery collection alone would be a whole paragraph!

Monday afternoon or evening, I’ll probably pause and reflect on what we have done, by God’s grace, and one very special thing that my parents never got to do: celebrate three decades of life together as husband and wife.

They were married in the summer of 1970 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Deer Creek, Iowa, just outside Fort Dodge. Walt and Janet were both teachers at Trinity’s parochial school – Dad, 5th-8^th grade and school principal; Mom, 1^st-4^th and, I believe, church organist. After a first date arranged by air-mailing a paper airplane across the hall, they, too, said their “I do’s.” A trinity of pastors - my Grandpa, Dad’s brother, Bill (the same aforementioned who snuck in “Obey” for my wife), and Mom and Dad’s pastor, Maynard Brandt - performed the holy rite of marriage. For twenty-nine faithful years, they worked side-by-side in three different Lutheran schools and in the four different homes, teaching children and then rearing their own.

Dad died on April 25, 2000, roughly two months short of their 30^th anniversary. Some sixty days after his funeral, the afternoon of what would have been their anniversary, Mom called me, sobbing. “You won’t believe what your Dad gave me,” she said. How was I to guess what the eerie gift-from-the-grave might be. I had fast flashes of a flower arrangement delivered to the house, or jewelry waiting at a jeweler, or a new Precious Moments commemorative plate for her wall display, pre-ordered and pre-planned for that special day. Even if I spent the rest of the day making uneducated guesses, I never would have guessed that in the mailbox, waiting for Mom, was Dad’s life insurance check from a policy she didn’t know he had taken out a few years earlier - a melancholy, final gift of love. She wasn’t suddenly a wealthy widow, ready to travel the world and see the sights, but it was more money than she ever had at a single moment in time. It would be enough that she could do something that she and Dad always wanted, talked about it often, but never could do: to own her own place, the dirt below and the house above, all in her name. She said, once, that it may have been her house but it was Dad’s money. She didn’t mean it in a separistic, divisionary way. They had always lived as a “what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine” lifestyle. She just meant that had Dad not made that purchase of insurance, she would not have been able to build her – their – dream. Thus, while it was her name on the deed, it was their home.

Death separated Dad from Mom, but she remained faithful to her husband and her promises to him for another 26 years until her own death on February 10 of this year. Their pledge made almost 56 years ago was complete, honored and cherished until death.

The foolish romantic in me imagines that Dad met Mom at the Pearly Gates with a bouquet, a goofy grin, and a card saying something like, “Happy Belated Anniversary,” but in reality, that’s just a Family Circus-esque cartoon. I don’t believe there are still physical marriages in heaven, based on what Jesus says, but I do believe Mom and Dad know each other and, in a mysterious union in and through Christ, are even more intimately connected now than ever on earth. No longer Mr. and Mrs. Walter Meyer, they now are simply and wonderfully children of God, rejoicing at the foot of the Lamb, whose marriage celebration to His bride, the Church, never ceases.

I often think of Mom and Dad and that pledge they made to each other - although it was much shorter than they intended. Monday afternoon, as I remember for myself my own pledge to my wife, and her pledge to me, I will thank God for parents who modeled faithful lives and husband and wife for us. I will thank God for the three decades He has given Laura and me as husband and wife.

And I will pray God’s continued blessings as we stand on the threshold of year thirty-one and whatever lies ahead, til death do us part. Robert Frost wrote a poem about the road less traveled, choosing to take that, and how that road made all the difference. We’re going down a road Mom and Dad never got to travel.

Hopefully, that will be a journey, a long way down the road.