Love letter to my wife

Dena Adrienne Qastin, pom pom girl!

July 17, 2020.To be brutally candid, my life these past four months has probably been better for me than the preceding four months, and all of the time in Wisconsin has been much better than the idea that we could still being in Baltimore, by several orders of magnitude. And I owe it all to my wonderful wife. This is my story, Love in the Time of Pandemic. With apologies to Love in the Time of Cholera, the novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez.

Were it not for Dena, we would not be living her in Wisconsin. Without Dena, we’d not have her parents drawing us back to be near to them.

These memories take me back to when people would tell us, “Once you have kids, you’ll never have your life back,” or pundits who laugh at the idea of kids living at home after graduation from college. And at the same time, I must also be candid to note that I never thought that I would follow in the footsteps of some of our friends, who made empty nest decisions to move closer to their elderly parents. While I knew that all would be better off were we to live near elderly parents, Paige and Ed died ten years ago and without Dena, we’d not have Jane and Abid as a magnet for our move.

Probably unlike we expected, back on that March 13 night when first word of the ‘lockdown’ – another misleading term if there is one – we were able to adjust and adapt. We experienced a level of intimacy from living close together for weeks on end, and we had a wholly unexpected positive experience of having both girls in the house with us for many weeks, an experience we never thought we’d have once they both left for college and one we imagine we may never yet again experience.

No one is describing a bed or roses, nor am I denying bumps along the road. But the combination of Dena’s intuition to come back home, her work ethic in supplying the country with needed supplies, and her ability to handle all the things that I declined to do – which basically meant almost all of the grocery shopping and errand running – they all made this experience less unpleasant, if not more positive than we could ever have expected.

This time and Dena’s insight also helped me to spend more time with Jane and Abe, to better know and understand them. And Dena’s devotion to duties enabled me to spend more time on the things that I could do, and that was to pray, protect, and provide for the family.

This also produced a new type of intimacy, and not simply one between a retired husband and an employed wife. Even the so-called social distancing and allegedly impersonal elements of Zoom meeting technology proved to create more intimacy, stronger relationships, and new channels of communication in ways that did not occur prior to the pandemic.

Having Dena working from home has also produced better time management as well as more opportunities for spontaneity, absent the rigors and structures of a daily commute and office structure. Unlike many of the articles about the difficulty of working from home, our lives improved with Dena’s time at home, working.

And another reason to both love and admire my wife -- without Dena’s determination to secure employment at the time she did, we’d be in much worse shape in psychological, financial and – perhaps most importantly – medical insurance terms. Dena provided for us.