My Bride:
2 days ago now my bride of 52 years passed away peacefully at the Queensway Carleton Hospital here in Ottawa. I have been reading a number of comments made by my family and friends and I am so very grateful.
I thought it time I waded in with my version of the Joanne and Rex story, so here goes.
We met in Halifax in 1964, October I think. I had recently finished my trades training at RCAF Station Clinton and Halifax was my first posting. On arrival, the first place I went was the Wet Canteen as it was called in those days, and I was hearing stories of all the young Nursing students from the Halifax Children's Hospital who lived in residence directly across the street from where us young, hungry RCAF guys were living. There was a great friendship between the 2 groups because everyone was about the same age and mostly newly living away from home.
At any rate I was in the snack bar on our side with a buddy of mine who eventually became my best man, Vic Anderson when these 2 nursing students came in. It must have been early evening. Vic was engaged to a young lady from Goderich Ontario and was truly in love with her. But I digress, at some point we approached these 2 young students and Vic started up a conversation with the one I was interested in, but he did not know that, it was Joanne, and they decided to cross the street to a party which was going on. I was left standing there, so I started up a conversation with Joanne's girlfriend, Shirley and at some point we went over to the party, all the time Shirley knew that the only reason I asked her to go with me was I wanted to see Joanne. Following so far??? It gets better.
Lets move a up a week or so when I secretly arranged with myself to watch for Joanne heading for work and I would casually meet up with her unexpectedly and walk her to work after taking the long way around the park. This worked out in my favour, it was the start of 52+ years together.
We got married on 30 Oct 1965 and our first posting together was to Whitehorse YT in 1967. From there I dragged her to Ottawa, Beausejour MB, Debert NS then back to Ottawa in 1982. She really was naive when we met and did not fully realize the life of a military wife was not well rooted, it was nomadic, us not as much as others but still we moved quite a bit. And of course there were my military duties away from home where Joanne became totally responsible for keeping things together and running somewhat smoothly.
Life progress for us, we had 2 children, Bob and Kim and they became rooted in Ottawa, that became their home and when they had children do you think Grandma was going to move somewhere else; forget it, we were now home in Ottawa.
52 year marriages do not just happen, they take more work than a lot of folks are willing to put in, but we, actually being on our own from a very early age, made it work. And making it work it large part was because of my Bride of 52 years. Damn, here come the tears again ....... OK, onward.
Joanne's health started to deteriorate a number of years ago and i won't go into the details because it is none of your business. Suffice to say, towards the end it fell to me to take over the household reins, an event that Joanne grew to detest; because it made her feel over dependent and that was not Joanne. She was he own woman right to the end, even her passing was on her terms, not the family, not the doctors but Joanne's terms.
We are all going to miss her dearly and our little dog Bandit is still looking for his morning cuddles from Joanne which became a daily event. He looks around for her and obviously doesn't understand and I don't talk "dog" so I can't explain it to him. But at any rate we will make out marginally OK but things will never be great again.
Got to close this down or my tears are going to short out my keyboard.
