I just watched a commercial for an investment company. It showed a couple over time, opening doors. It started when they opened the door to their first home together and then went through their life together as they opened all other kinds of doors. It ended with them opening the door to an investment firm, and the tag line came. They did it together, a life well planned. 

It was an successful commercial. The images of their life together as they walked through doors stayed in my head. The couple started out young and in love and ended up old and in love. We saw all the stages of their lives in between  – the birth of children, the starting of jobs, grown children, retirement, the death of parents and so on – all effectively told and shown in a minute with the metaphor of opening doors. Of course, there’s a point and purpose behind it. Boomers are retiring, and many of them have been married for decades. They were definitely targeting a specific demographic, and perhaps a younger demographic who admired their parents and aspired to their achievements, or what they perceived their achievements to be.

I have no interest in the investment company that was being advertised. In fact, I don’t even remember what company it was. I just remember the tag line, especially the part “they did it together”. Most of us try to plan but life happens and plans go by the wayside. But living a life together, well, that takes guts and compromise and hard work and love. And it changes. There are easy times and difficult times. The joy of the easy times gives you the hope and inspiration to get through the pain of the difficult times. And people change. The secret is to change together, or to embrace the changes your partner makes, if you can.

Not many of us make it through a lifetime together. Dale and I first started dating, or going out as we called it, when we were 13. We broke up, got back together, broke up, got back together, got engaged and then got married. This year marked our 39th wedding anniversary but if you go from when we last broke up and then stayed together, it’s been 44 years, give or take a few months. And I hope there are many more years for us to be together ahead. But nothing is guaranteed and life can change on a dime.

If we do make it together to the near end of our lives, I hope we will be treated with respect and love. There have been stories of long married couples who are separated because their local care home can’t take them both. Or stories of one spouse who has to travel hours by bus to visit the other spouse who has been placed in a care home far away. If we make it to old, old age still married to each other, shouldn’t we be allowed to spend what little time is left together? I spoke to a woman who lived in the apartment building across from our townhouse in Port Coquitlam. Her husband was in the local full care home and she lived nearby. She could visit him several times a day. It was an easy walk of just a few minutes. I don’t know what happened first. If he was placed in the home and she moved or if they moved to the apartment and then he was placed in the home. But however it happened, they could still see each other at least once every day. They were as together as they could be, given his poor health and her relatively good health.

There are also stories of couples who die within days, even hours, of each other. As if the thread of love and commitment that pulled them together in life pulled them together in death. As if they couldn’t imagine living without each other. We tend to celebrate new, young love, but old love is far more rare. And its rarity should make it more valuable and thus more desired, more worthy of celebration.

So I’m changing the tag line on the commercial. They did it together. A life well lived, a life well loved. What a legacy to leave behind. We should aspire to that, not to a huge portfolio of investments.