The Enduring Sweetness

Between a Woman and a Man

Christl could have done almost anything. She could think in numbers and visualize like the artist she was. She read widely. She was highly articulate, with an easy, natural vocabulary larger than many native speakers of English. She had an open directness that, combined with being a good listener, made her able to interact confidently with almost anyone.

She could learn, and she could teach. She thought things through, and then she acted. She had no problem making decisions. She was intuitive; she was analytical. She could be richly emotional, then cooly detached. She was at ease in her body and presented herself, as she was, without being embarassed or combative.

She was ethical, creative, trustworthy. She went beyond being honest — to the principle of manifesting her truth, though sometimes her Germanic directness sounded abrupt.

She could make mistakes and learn from them. She managed money with ease. She took naturally to work. By the time I met her, Christl had already been successful in a string of interim jobs from secretary to nanny to executive assistant to day-manager at a retirement home. She might have become an engineer or architect or executive. She could have done almost anything.

But when I met her, what she wanted first and most was to be a Mom.

She wanted to raise children in a family with a man who would be a father to their children and love her and be true to her. For 42 years, I was the lucky man who made that possible.

Christl loved stability, tradition, regularity, and order. And as soon as she had achieved these things, she would do something different — because she also loved spontaneity and change. Many days I came home from work to find the house rearranged. Furniture swapped out for something different. A white wall might now be painted the color of burnt orange, with streaks of translucent gray like clouds across it. This was the woman who completed every requirement for a college degree in art and psychology, then cheerfully walked away — danced away, probably — a free spirit, without even collecting the diploma. Our life was an ongoing mixture of stable order and creative chaos.

She preferred to cook traditional foods, but every time, she made them differently. Whenever she was discouraged by how such an experiment came out, I assured her no one would ever know, because I would eat the evidence.

I loved waking up to her. I loved seeing her walk through the door. Even a short separation made the reunion sweet. It was as if, around one another, our skin was thinner, or we had none, and the insides of our bodies, our veins and organs, gently touched across the distance, caressed and talked to one another. Yet, always, we remained separate and independent beings.

That sense of being completely merged, yet also, in ourselves, each completely whole, was one of the mysteries of our life together. It was as if giving up ourselves to one another enabled us to become fully who we were.

We had the struggles most couples seem to have — from senseless quarrels and recurring irritations to periods of alienation to a midlife crisis on the edge of divorce — but our relationship made us into the kind of people who could live through such problems while being true to ourselves, and to one another.

Why am I telling you this? — Because Christl wanted me to.

Not long after we retired in 2009, she invited me to display my colorful abstract photographs in her studio. She had rented space in a little art district in Tallahassee, where she displayed her accomplished nature paintings and vivid abstracts. I didn’t think my work was worth displaying alongside hers, since I had only recently begun making it. But she had a different idea.

Once a month, on First Fridays, hundreds of students wandered through the art district for a cheap night out with friends, among artists doing interesting things.

I had acquired a long couch from an friend whose yellow labs slept on it for a decade till they became too old and fat to make the jump. We wrestled that couch into the studio, where Christl spent hours restoring the exquisite leather and repadding the cushions till, on First Fridays, it became a prime place where groups of wandering students threw themselves down, boys and girls draped across one another, to rest and snuggle and get warm and talk about art, but mostly about their lives, with Christl.

She wanted me to display my work in the gallery alongside hers, she said, so the two of us could be there together — so these young people could see us together, could see the ease between us, how naturally we took delight in one another, could feel the sweet vibration between two people who had long been in love with one another and had achieved a deep peace. She especially liked answering how long we had been married — more than 30 years at that point — and watching their surprise as they heard.

Christl wanted young people to know that such a relationship was possible, and they could make one for themselves. In a time of turbulence and questioning, a time when so much was in doubt, we two had come to embody one of the oldest, simplest, most ordinary things in human history, the thing that makes history possible — the enduring sweetness between a woman and a man, and the way two people rearrange everything in their worlds to be worthy of that sweetness and keep it alive. And in arranging our lives to support that sweetness, we help create a world worth living in.

After a marriage that filled 42 years with life, Christl Kaserer Grow died Feb. 15, 2021, three weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 76. Read more about her in “Home Birth, Home Death,” “At the Nude Beach in Vienna,” “Christl’s Resume as a Mom,” “Christl and the Icon Panties,” “Recovering a Lost Photograph.”