❤️ TREE 197: Laugh together

This week is Christine’s and my 25th wedding anniversary. We’re sharing things that make our relationship thrive. We hope some of them will be useful to you.

The day our second son
was stillborn at full term
we watched News Radio
on the hospital TV
and laughed.

What else could we do?
The shock, the grief
overwhelmed us. The future
was incomprehensible.
Words died in our throats,
so we turned on the TV
and laughed.

That was the first day
of the worst year
of our life together.
We still laughed. Not often
but sometimes, somehow
together.

When Christine was ill
with depression and later
when I was, when our kid
was off the rails and at our throats,
when the world went mad,
we found each other
and laughed.

From the plastic pig
that was my flirting prop
to last night when Christine
annihilated the trailer for
Liam Neeson’s new film –
in the space between us, the world
is illuminated with ridiculous glory.
I can’t remember the last
day we didn’t laugh
together.

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The flip side

We are not amused when people mock and insult their partners in front of other people. 25 years ago, we decided to never do that. It was a good decision.

Grow together
Jeff & Christine

Our honeymoon ended with 12 hours on a National Express bus travelling from a wrecked Austin Mini in northern Scotland to our families in South Wales. There’s no way we couldn’t laugh at this song together.

The Memory of TREE playlist – every song from every email: