The quote is from my beloved, quadriplegic wife, Tina Su Cooper. We've been in love for over half a century and married for 35 years. The interview is here:
https://soundcloud.com/user-83823599/episode-4-doug-cooper
A short version of our memoir is here:
“Like a Plaintive
Melody”
by
Douglas Winslow Cooper
Most
mornings I sing to my beloved wife, as she lies immobile in the hospital bed we
have at our home:
You
were meant for me. I was meant for you.
Nature
patterned you and when she was done,
You
were all the sweet things rolled up in one.
You’re
like a plaintive melody
That
never lets me free,
For
I’m content the angels must have sent you
And
they meant you just for me.*
This
song captures the bitter-sweet nature of our current situation, happy to be
together, sometimes sad that Tina’s ill-health has limited her so greatly. She
has been quadriplegic and ventilator-dependent, fed and medicated through a
gastric tube, for the past ten years, and she will be so for as long as she
lives.
Meant
for Each Other
Our
love story began in January 1963. Cornell University formed the beautiful
backdrop for our romance. When Tina Su walked into the second semester of the
language course I was taking, Chinese 102, I saw the incarnation of my feminine
ideal: lovely, slender, soft-spoken, elegant without pretension, graceful. After a few “coffee dates,” I learned that
this Chinese - American woman was also intelligent, learned, cheerful,
talented, considerate, kind, and more than somewhat attracted to me, too. By Valentine’s
Day, 1963, we were officially in love, “going steady.” That included going
hand-in-hand together whenever and wherever we could. When it was cold, we
would each shed one glove and share my coat pocket. We loved to walk and to
talk, to hug and to kiss. Bliss.
Tina
and I like to think we were “fated to be mated.” It seems amazing that this
girl from Kunming, China, and this boy from Manhattan could have found each
other. How lucky is that? There were about a billion folk in China. We had then
in the U.S. less than a few million Chinese. That’s roughly 1000 to 1 odds of
being in the U.S., not China. I was
accepted by M.I.T., but my scholarship application was a few days late, leaving
Cornell as my best option. Less than one student in a thousand at Cornell was
in Chinese 102, so the probability of a randomly picked pair of students being
in that eight-person class was less than one in a hundred thousand. The random
nature of genetic combination means that she could have been born a very
different person than she was, the same being true for me. I would not have
married her sister, nor she any of my brothers.
Nature
Patterned You
Actually,
nature patterned each of us. Scientists generally agree now that much of our
abilities and personalities are strongly influenced by genetics. A decade or
two ago, Tina and I took the Briggs-Myers personality inventory test and found
ourselves remarkably alike: more introvert than extrovert, equally intuitive
vs. sensing, much more rational than emotional, more judgmental than passively
perceiving.
In
making us well matched for each other, nurture played a significant role, too.
Both grew up in homes that valued education and thrift. The Chinese Taoist
tradition favors compassion, modesty, and humility – virtues that my religion
also supported.
All
the Sweet Things
Tina
was very popular and justly so. She had been senior class president in her high
school. All the Cornell sororities she visited asked her to join. She made
life-long friends at Cornell, always giving more than she got and tending to
see the best in others. Warm, friendly, sympathetic, helpful,
trustworthy…exceptionally nice, Tina was special.
Like
a Plaintive Melody
She
was a freshman and I was a junior. We had three glorious semesters left to be
together, and we fell even more deeply in love. Usually, a couple our ages
would have become engaged to marry, perhaps soon after Tina had graduated. It
quickly had become clear, however, that an interracial marriage would estrange
Tina from her parents (as did happen to her younger brother several years
later). My own parents argued that such a marriage would bring added
complications for ourselves and for any children we might have. Then, too, we
were young, with little real experience in the adult world. Neither of us would
want to have a wrong decision harm the other. We accepted parental persuasion
and pressure and parted very sorrowfully when I graduated, June 1964. We each
cried a lot about our separation that summer…and occasionally thereafter.
Tina’s
parents arranged for her to take her junior year abroad in England, where her
father, a professor of engineering, took his sabbatical year at the same time,
and her mother accompanied him. That put the Atlantic Ocean between us, an
enormous moat.
While
Tina was in England, I was drafted. She returned to finish at Cornell, went to
Harvard, dated men of Chinese ancestry only, and married a promising scientist
from Taiwan, who took a faculty position in Chicago. She spent the next fifteen
years under his thumb. He had expected a traditional Chinese woman, but she was
an American girl with a Chinese flavor. Their marriage was rocky, but two fine
sons were born. Her first multiple sclerosis exacerbation, and with it a
temporary partial paralysis, came right after that second son’s birth. Her
husband, more committed to career than to family, had little time for his wife
and children.
After
serving in the U.S. Army, I went on to graduate school at Penn State and
Harvard. I married a Caucasian woman who strongly reminded me of Tina, and I
steadily progressed professionally, becoming an associate professor of
environmental physics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Unfortunately,
eight years into my marriage, I found out my wife was having an affair. She was
from a rich family and thought she could get away with it. Wrong! We divorced.
Later
on, I dated, even got engaged, then disengaged. None had been Tina’s equal.
That
Never Lets Me Free
I
had never forgotten my precious Tina, but we seemed doomed to be apart.
Nineteen
years after we parted, while I was on an academic business trip through
Chicago, I called Tina there. Before calling, I had reason to suspect her
marriage was in trouble. As we chatted, I was so comfortable talking with her,
it seemed we had been apart for weeks, not years. I told her in my call I still
loved her and I had to know whether we could ever be married..
“Nothing
has changed for me in twenty years,” she stated circumspectly, because she
might be overheard. She meant she loved me as much as she ever had.
Soon
after this, we talked several times via long-distance phone calls and we
corresponded. She did a courageous thing, an honorable thing: she told me she
had multiple sclerosis. I read a lot about it, spent a very sad night (that’s
plaintive!) imagining her someday to be quadriplegic, on a ventilator, fed
through tubes. Could I handle that, if I had to? Yes. Could I bear to walk away and learn someday
she had gone through that without me? No.
“Will
you marry me?” I asked her over the telephone that next day.
“Yes,
yes, yes!”
I
had yet to see her. When we did finally meet, weeks later, I was thrilled. She
was all I hoped she would be.
On
June 2, 1984, about a year later, we were married. Her father toasted us after
the wedding, “Love conquered all.” As one of the conquered, he would know. Her
parents had “surrendered” gracefully, after all. Our wedding rings were
inscribed, “a dream come true.”
For
ten years, multiple sclerosis was minimal. Then she had an exacerbation, a
severe attack. For the next ten years, Tina could no longer walk, but retained
the use of her hands and arms. Then, in
2004, we nearly lost her altogether.
The
Angels Must Have Sent You
“Please,
God, don’t let her die,” I prayed and pleaded as I walked our dog around a
little lake in early March of 2004, almost twenty years after we wed.
Tina
Su Cooper, my beloved wife, had already been in a medically induced coma for a
week in the Critical Care Unit of the Orange Regional Medical Center. She had a
severe case of aspiration pneumonia, part of an M.S. exacerbation. The
resulting infection had spread throughout her body. She was not expected to
live.
I
had called the 911 emergency number near midnight the week before. Tina’s
temperature was rising alarmingly fast. The EMTs got her to the Emergency Room
twenty minutes before I arrived. She had told them that she did not want any
invasive procedures, no tubes down her throat, etc. I countermanded
that, having her power of attorney and knowing that this was no time for fuzzy
thinking. Her M.S., especially when she was feverish, had diminished her
cognitive abilities, which previously had earned her honors at Cornell and
Harvard and then an editorial position at the Encyclopedia Britannica.
“Do
whatever you must to save her life,” I instructed the medical personnel. Thus
began a one-hundred-day battle to keep Tina alive.
Later,
when she was out of the coma but still near death, now quadriplegic, unable to
speak due to an air tube that ran between her lips and down her throat, being
fed intravenously, I asked her whether I had made the right choice, to take all
steps needed to save her life. Yes, she nodded, emphatically, yes.
Near
June 2, 2004, our twentieth wedding anniversary, the decision had to be made:
go home to fight vigorously to live or go to a hospice to go gently to the
grave? She was catching infections from the other patients in the hospital.
This place of rescue had become dangerous to her.
Would
we fight to preserve her life at home, in a replica of the hospital’s Critical
Care Unit, or did she want to give up?
We
would persevere.
“Be
a brave soldier,” her father had often told her in her youth. We fight on, my
brave soldier and I.
The
doctors estimated she would live only a few months. We’ve had ten years,
precious, sometimes difficult, wonderful years.
I
thank God daily for the miracle of another day that we are together.
And
They Meant You Just for Me
“Together
forever,” we hope. That’s inscribed on a charm I gave Tina for our 25th
anniversary 2009, five years after her near-death experience. We say it to each
other daily.
A
retired physicist, I put much stock in evidence and reason, less on faith. When
I pray, I pray that Tina be healed or at least be comforted. Perhaps asking for
healing is reaching too far, but Robert Browning wrote that one’s “reach should
exceed his grasp, else what’s a Heaven for?”
In Heaven, Tina would be healed. On Earth, if healing is not in the
works, then consolation, or better, joy, may be possible. Love certainly is.
The
cosmic Big Bang, fourteen billion years ago, certainly seems like the act of
creation. Creation implies Creator, though it leaves open His origin and
purposes.
We
know there are billions of galaxies, each with millions or billions of stars.
So far, however, we find that the chemistry and physics of these stars is the
same as we have here. That leads to another observation: there are a dozen or
so fundamental properties of the forces and of the matter that make up our
world that need to be within a percent or less of their value on Earth for life
to exist, even for the universe to resemble what it does. The probability of
getting these properties all to be within the proper limits just by chance is
infinitesimal. Cannot happen. Had to be designed by a Designer.
Unfortunately,
there is no consensus on what the Creator/ Designer/God intends with all this.
Various religions have various beliefs. If there are humanlike entities on
other worlds, they are likely to have multitudinous religions, too. We are left
to come to our best understanding in the limited time we have alive.
I
believe Christ was divine. He told us we are to love one another. He said that
his Father, God, had a place for us after we die, depending on our faith. It is
inconceivable to me that other good people of different faiths will be
excluded, though I know it is Christian dogma. We’ll see.
Tina
and I will be buried side by side, though not likely simultaneously. If we are
resurrected, wonderful. If not, so be it. Either way, “Together forever.” This
will be engraved at the bottom of our shared headstone.
The
pessimist is said to see the glass as half-empty and the optimist to see it as
half-full. We are optimists and are enjoying what is left in our glass of life.
We
have had to “play the hand we’re dealt,” with good cards and bad. Life is
something like a card game, where playing more skillfully improves your odds
without guaranteeing you will win. Tina and I feel we have been lucky and
prudent and have won.
As
we sat on our porch on a recent autumn afternoon, we agreed: if that were our
last day on Earth, it had all been worth it.
###
Douglas
Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., retired physicist, is a freelance writer who has written
Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage, and Devotion, published in 2011
by Outskirts Press, available through amazon.com and tingandi.com. He has
co-authored Ava Gardner’s Daughter? and The Shield of Gold, and
edited High Shoes and Bloomers, three other memoirs also published by
Outskirts Press and available from amazon.com and other Internet vendors. This
article is an adaptation and extension of a shorter piece, “Ting and I,”
published in the Winter 2011 Momentum - The National Multiple Sclerosis
Society Magazine.
*“You
Were Meant for Me (Broadway Melody of 1940)” by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur
Freed; lyrics © EMI Music Publishing Co.
###
Published
in anthology edited by Michelle Tupy (2015), Love Alters: A Love for All Seasons, pp. 56-61.
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