A lady who visits my shop from time to time ventured out from her home during a storm a few weeks ago to attend a dinner party.
Let us call her "Jane", which isn't her name, but it will help in telling the story.
As she traversed a steep path in the rain - a mossy, amateurishly-made path of the kind so beloved by do-it-yourself New Zealanders living in hilly places like Wellington - she fell and broke her arm.
The pain was excruciating, but that was where her troubles began, rather than ended.
The arm was put in a cast, and Jane was off work for 4-6 weeks. During that period she could no longer drive, and was - for the first time in many years - wholly dependent upon her husband for meals, for maintenance of the home, and for getting about outside.
Jane's husband is eight years older than her. Now that the children have left home they have no interests in common. None. This is a fact which was apparent to Jane before her accident, but not felt as it has been since then.
Why is this? What had focused her mind on the vast differences between her husband and herself - in terms of leisure interests and, more fundamentally, in personality type - which have emerged in these past few weeks?
It may help to answer this question if I outline two possible sets of responses to Jane's predicament:
* On the one hand, the husband could have thrown himself body and soul into the task of caring for Jane. He could have construed this accident as an opportunity to show Jane that she was the most important thing in his life; that her welfare meant more to him than anything else. Not merely responding to her needs, he could have sought to anticipate them, making her feel as comfortable as possible and doing what he could to facilitate her recovery.
In your dreams, I hear you cry.
A seond approach is this:
* On the other hand, he might have sought to continue his - essentially private and separate - life, declining to allow Jane's needs since the accident to impinge on his own comfort any more than he possibly could. If Jane wanted to go anywhere, it would be a major effort on his part - a major concession, if you will - to get the car out of the garage and take Jane where she wanted or needed to go. Meals would be a huge chore, achieved with minimal competence and maximum fuss. Ditto housework, and anything else which needed to be done.
No suprises for guessing which approach the husband has taken.
The upshot is - no, I don't know yet what the upshot is. I suspect the husband will be out on his arse in a few months, which - however much it may be deserved - has to be seen as a very sad way for a marriage of 25+ years to end.
And it all came about because of a fall on a poorly-maintained Wellington path, on a wet and miserable night in spring.
This is a true story, with no moral to it that I can possibly discern.
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