A Study: Taking A Risk By Cathy Brown

1752 Words4 Pages

My Little Dear
Sleep comes easily to Cathy McGill. At age 70, she now requires a continuous positive airway machine to rest. It silences her usual nighttime noises and subdues her tossing and turning.
Her husband Steve wakes repeatedly at night to pat her hand. Most nights he sleeps without sleeping. In the morning he apologizes for touching her hand so often. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I just have to make sure you’re warm.”
The couple has found themselves at an age when they wonder how they will live without each other. Wistfully Cathy calls her marriage “a good love story” and by her tender voice and blurred eyes it 's clear she treasures her connection with her husband.
But the value of their relationship was not obtained easily. Through a …show more content…

The previous year her daughter Rachel had reported to London, England to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). After being transferred to Poole, England Rachel met a non-member named Steve. He was single and in his forties when she met him and he was quickly interested in the church and started having Rachel and her companion over regularly to teach him about the Gospel. One day Rachel asked him to write a letter to her mother and assure her she was happy and healthy. Steve wrote the first of many letters between him and Cathy. Letters turned into phone calls and phone calls turned into tapes and pictures. During their developing long distance relationship Steve was baptized and asked Cathy to come to England to stay with him for one week before her daughter finished her mission. She readily said yes, but the week before her trip Cathy fell and broke her leg.
Despite a large cast and a wheelchair, Cathy traveled 4, 821 miles (Google Maps) from her home in Farmington, Utah to meet a man she hadn’t met before, a man she thought she …show more content…

She said, “You have to be comfortable that you don 't know exactly how you are going to get to the results that you want to see.” On December 28, 1992 Steve and Cathy made a commitment to strive for the results they wanted when they were married in the LDS temple in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was a cold and rainy winter day and Cathy didn’t have a coat to wear while they took wedding pictures. In all their photos from that day she is wearing Steve’s suit coat and the couple couldn’t have been happier. After a brief honeymoon in north bountiful Cathy and Steve went home to Farmington and started their lives together. Married and in their forties, the couple thought of themselves as two people starting over. Without the young children, child support, or alimony to settle their commitment was unmistakably to the other person. They promised to love each other for time and all eternity. UCLA psychologists predict that a deeper level of commitment, like Steve and Cathy’s, is an effective predictor of lower divorce rates and fewer problems in marriage. Putting in the work and effort to love each other and stay married is different than being in love. It causes tighter bonds, stronger connections, and long lasting

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