Late Life Love

Photo: Bob and Ruth Elliott, high school classmates from the class of 1955, meet years later at a funeral, fall in love, get married, and spend halcyon summers on Good Harbor Bay.

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Bob and Ruth Elliott had been classmates at East Lansing High School, 50-some years before they began a late life friendship that would become a wonderful marriage.

They had known each other, but only slightly, in high school. “Bob had been president of our student body his senior year,” Ruth says as the two of them sit talking at their cottage on Lake Michigan on a heady blue-and-gold September day.

“We love being in this paradise,” Ruth says, looking out at the bright blue waters of Good Harbor Bay. They have been married nine years, spending summers up north and winters in Holland, as well as doing some traveling during the winter months.

A high school classmate had sent out an email in 2005 letting everyone know that their classmate Ruth Marrison’s husband, Del Wiersema, had died from heart failure. He had been employed by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) for most of the years the couple had been married and they had lived in Florida for much of that time, until retiring back to the Holland area of West Michigan.

The East Lansing High School class of 1955 had 120 students, tight-knit, and they had stayed in touch. “On the day of my husband’s funeral,” Ruth says, “Bob’s granddaughter was having a concert in Jenison, about twenty miles away, which he planned to attend. Bob felt he should come to Del’s funeral, too, since it was close, to offer condolences and give support, sort of as a representative of our high school.”

“I went to the funeral home,” Bob says, and Ruth said, “’What are you doing here?’”

“I was so surprised,” Ruth says as she picks up the story, “Bob said the nicest thing. He said, ‘I know what you’re going through. I lost my wife a year ago. If you ever feel you need someone to talk to, come up to the cottage and walk the beach.’”

Bob says, “A whole gang of girls from our high school class got together every summer up at the cottage,” so Ruth already knew where his cottage was. Kay was one of the women in the group and Bob asked his friend Charlie, Kay’s husband, what he should do about his budding relationship with Ruth. “Charlie said I should go ahead,” Bob said. Bob decided to get engaged, but he said to Charlie, who was on his way to the Upper Peninsula with his wife, Kay, “’Don’t tell Kay until you cross the bridge,’ because then I knew there’d be no cell phone reception and she couldn’t call and try to dissuade me.”

According to David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, quoted in Time Magazine in July 2013, “People are living to older ages and we are adding healthy years.” But still, getting married again in one’s seventies, can cause friends and family members to urge caution.

Bob laughs at the memory of Ruth’s first visit and says, “My grandchildren were here when Ruth visited, so we were well chaperoned. We did talk and laugh and cry and walk on the beach.” The lives of two people who had barely known each other when both were in high school, had converged almost fifty years later, after many life experiences in the meantime, including marriages to other people.

Bob and Ruth walked the beach for two days. They climbed up to Pyramid Point. They talked. They did not so much as hold hands. And then Ruth went back to her job in Holland where she was a social worker at a home for the elderly.

When she went back to her job in Holland, they began to talk on the phone. “I would call him,” Ruth says, “when I got home from work. We’d hang up.” Bob had unlimited long distance calling on his phone. “He’d call me back.” It took them only a few months to decide to marry. “At our age,” Ruth says philosophically, “Why wait?”

“Kay’s first question,” Bob says, “when I told her Ruth and I were engaged, was, ‘Is she a Christian?’” He laughs, “I said, ‘of course.’”

Ruth laughs. “We realized we were very compatible.” They are both concerned about making ethical choices in life, both are concerned about being people of compassion. They belong to a church group called the Soul Searchers and enjoy the fellowship of others who also are seeking answers to life’s questions. Both like music. Ruth was a member of various choirs for years and Bob listens to the birds around his cottage and can identify the calls, spontaneously picking out the sound of an unseen cardinal, for instance, or a kingfisher.

“We both have Masters degrees in our fields.” Bob says. “We’re Christian. We go to the Methodist Church in Leland. We got married in the Dutch Reformed Church in Zeeland.” They go to the Leland church in the summer and the Zeeland church in the winter. Bob’s father was a minister with a degree from the Yale Divinity School and Ruth has always gone to church, but they don’t consider themselves doctrinaire. They are open-minded, open to change, open to possibility, open to joy, as their marriage itself indicates.

“We would have never dated in high school,” Ruth says. “It just wouldn’t have happened.” She pauses, as if considering whether or not to say why, but then decides to go on. “I lived in Okemos and I wanted to go to school there.” Okemos, now an affluent suburb, was at that time largely rural. “In Okemos I could wear farmer coveralls to school and I liked that. East Lansing High School was for the children of the highly educated. Then the zoning changed and I had to go to East Lansing High School. I couldn’t choose. At East Lansing High the girls wore clothes from Knapp’s and Jacobson’s.” Knapp’s and Jacobson’s, two very expensive and exclusive department stores at the time, were places Ruth says, “where I couldn’t afford to shop.”

Bob says, “Many of the students at East Lansing High School were the children of Michigan State University professors.”

“The children of lawyers and doctors, wealthy businessmen,” Ruth says.

“At that time,” Bob says, shaking his head, marveling at the thought of it, “anyone who graduated from East Lansing High School was automatically accepted at any public college in Michigan,” such was the reputation of the high school.

“My parents had to drop out of school during the Depression,” Ruth says. “My father came from a family with thirteen children. A load of spokes fell off the train and broke his back when he was working.” Spokes, part of the wooden frame for old-fashioned tires, were heavy. After her father recovered, he was unemployed, but finally found a job working in maintenance at Michigan State University. Ruth’s mother would become a housekeeper at a Michigan State sorority. “My parents persevered,” Ruth says. “They worked hard. They didn’t complain.”

“My parents, too,” Bob says. “They persevered.” He says he can go back four generations in his family and he is grateful for their steadiness in all ways.

Ruth was and is beautiful, but she says she had “very low self-esteem” in high school because she came from a family of uneducated people who were from an economically deprived background. She didn’t feel equal to the students in her high school from privileged backgrounds. They seemed born to be “smart and wealthy” just like their parents, and everything about their lives was beyond her expectations for her own life and for her future. Ruth would go on to get her Masters in social work, but in high school she says she would never have thought of herself as the kind of person who went to college, it would have never entered her mind in any conscious way, and so she would have never dated someone from a family like Bob’s.

Back in the early 1950s, Ruth was dating a handsome athlete, a man she planned to marry right after high school. That early marriage, which produced several children in rapid succession, wouldn’t last. Ruth would eventually marry Del Wiersema, an engineer for NASA.

In high school Bob was close friends with the daughter of a Michigan State University history professor. “Her last name was Fee,” Bob says, “mine was Elliott. All through school, starting in junior high, we were sitting next to each other – and the rest is history.”

Bob Elliott would sometimes walk the young Ann Fee home after school, carrying her books. “People were intimidated by her father. He was rather stern and aloof,” Bob says. “Her father had been valedictorian of his high school. His wife, Ann’s mother, had been salutatorian.” Both Bob’s mother and Ann’s mother were high school English teachers in the Lansing area; both mothers were Sunday school teachers. Bob got along well with Ann’s family.

Bob and Ann dated through high school, but after high school when they each went off to separate colleges — she to Ohio Wesleyan University and he staying to attend Michigan State — they corresponded but made no plans to marry. “I wanted her to be free to do what she needed to do, to meet someone if that happened, and not feel tied to me,” Bob says. They had what Kahlil Gibran calls, “spaces in your togetherness.” Ann went off to Edinburg, Scotland for her junior year, one of the first study abroad programs. “That was a very hard year for me,” Bob says.

Ann returned and soon after the couple married and started a family. In 1959, Bob Elliott accepted a job teaching chemistry and physics in the Traverse City High School. Bob and Ann stayed at her family’s cottage on Lake Michigan in a pristine stand of pine trees near the shore, a simple and rustic dwelling at that time with a panoramic view of Good Harbor and the night sky. “When Ann’s parents came here,” Bob says, looking around, “it was the mid-1930s and M-22 was a dirt road, very narrow, just a beautiful tunnel of green through the trees.”

In 1964 Bob went to Cornell University in New York State to get his Masters. “I realized I loved teaching astronomy,” Bob says. In 1965 he began teaching astronomy and running the planetarium at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. By this time, they had two children. As soon as those two children were in school fulltime, Ann became a librarian at the university.

“Ann was never sick a day in her life,” Bob says. He speculates that because of her library work handling films with chemicals, she contracted lung cancer. In 2000 they moved back to the cottage on Lake Michigan where Ann died in 2005. Bob spent a year there alone after her death and he said he realized then that he was not doing well. For the first time in his life he was drinking, something he’d never done. He knew that he couldn’t continue long like that and knew he was spending too much time alone. He wasn’t quite sure what to do. He wasn’t interested in seeing people or going out and socializing. He was angry and morose because he thought that Anne’s death might have been precipitated by the chemicals she’d inhaled in her work at the university. People at church tried to introduce him to other women, but he had no interest and, as a sign to everyone, continued to wear his wedding ring.

In a famous passage from Deuteronomy in the Bible, humans are told to “choose life,” and Bob says he realized that’s what he needed to do. “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you, that I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses,” reads the Biblical passage, “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”

Ruth was devastated after her husband Del’s death as well, but she was still working and this gave her something to think about besides the loss of her spouse. Her five children lived nearby and she had, in a sense, lost a husband before. Her first husband had mental difficulties that emerged soon after they were married. Something horrible in his mind inspired him to physically attack her, putting her in the hospital for a week with serious injuries. She had a restraining order against him from the police, but she says, “There’s nothing you can do when someone wants to kill you. You have to have 24-hour, around-the-clock, day-after-day protection.” Her twenty-four-hour protection was a man who married her.

“He was wonderful,” Ruth says of this brief marriage. “He was a truly good person. He had an I.Q. of 150. We’re still friends and I’m friends with his wife. But we weren’t intellectually compatible. I think he married me to protect me. He was that kind of guy.”

Bob says that at the 50-year reunion for their high school class, each student was asked to read something they had written about the events in his or her life. “When Ruth spoke,” Bob says, “I thought to myself, ‘That’s a very strong person.’”

Shortly after she and Bob married nine years ago, Ruth’s first husband — the handsome athlete, the one who assaulted her, who would become alcoholic and then find Jesus and be Born Again — died. Someone called her and told her. “I called my children,” Ruth says. “I told them I wasn’t going to go to the funeral. They said they weren’t going to go either. None of us were going to go.” She pauses. “But then, without talking about it, we all, one by one, over the next few days, changed our minds, and I’m so glad we did. At the funeral, we learned about all the people he had helped when he had been living on the street. There were all these people at the church giving their testimonials. They had loved him. He had loved them. This wasn’t the man who had beaten me almost to death.” She pauses. “We were all glad to have this closure.”

When a person lives eight decades, as both Bob and Ruth have, they say one of the good things about aging, is that one learns to withhold judgement, learns to forgive and learns to recognize a blessing, such as finding joy and companionship late in life.

“We’re both easy-going,” Ruth says. “There are no rules about who cooks or who does the yardwork.”
Bob says, “She cooks, and I do the dishes.”

“I love it here,” Ruth says. “It’s so beautiful.”

They both love the stars late at night out over Good Harbor Bay: Perseid meteor showers in mid-August, shooting stars, the planets and their journeys. Bob can name all the constellations. “I can tell what time of year it is,” Bob says, “by the position of the sun out there. It’s just like Stonehenge. The south end of North Manitou is where the sun sets on the first day of summer.”