One crisp fall day, long before cancer entered our lives, Mike and I were curled up around the kitchen table, just chatting. We were talking about life and the future, and I asked him – How do you see our relationship playing out? What’s our hierarchy? I’ve always been a “lead, follow, or get out of my way” person, and a champion for women’s rights. Mike’s a more “traditional relationship” kind of guy. Both of us were alpha leaders. How would we set up our world so we could walk easily together?
Mike pulled a piece of blank paper out of the stack on the table. He folded it in half, like a card. Picked up a pen, and wrote my organizational chart for our lives.
At the top – God.
Next up – Faith.
Then – Mike
J.C.
Catlin
All my friends and Louisa May Alcat
And that was my side of our chart. My life laid out on paper.
It took me a minute to process that Mike held the line above mine. That I wasn’t side by side with him. That he was, literally, the head of our family. I started to protest, and then I simply hushed. After a minute, I told him he was going to have to help me with this one. I’d never, not once in my life, stepped back and let anyone else lead our lives.
When Mike got to heaven, I know that Jim and Al were waiting at the gate. They slapped him on the back and shook his hand. Wanted to know how in the heck he did it? How in the world did he get Jane Carrie to agree to that?
I wonder what he answered. Had he asked, I could have told him what to say. There’s only one word. Trust. It was so much bigger than love. Michael Powell was the only person I ever completely trusted more than I trusted myself. I had complete faith in him. If he told me it was safe, it was safe. His wise counsel helped me in countless ways, and I learned to rely on it.
All my life, I’d wanted to trust someone else enough to lean and know I wouldn’t fall, but it never happened. Even with so much love, there were always chinks in the armor, gaps where I felt so much stronger. But I never found those gaps in Mike. He was strength personified – mental, physical and emotional.
One night in Alaska, I told Mike that I felt like it didn’t matter how much work I did on the support team, I could never catch up to all that he did for us. He asked – why do you think you have to? He was genuinely puzzled. He never expected me to carry the larger load. That was his job.
I thought about that for a long time. In over 60 years, I’d never been in this place. Catlin thought I’d lost my mind. I’d raised her to be an alpha woman. With Mike, I discovered other options. By walking this path, I learned about partnership, and it didn’t always come easily to me. The give and take of relationships. Celebrating and complimenting each other’s strengths. And 95% of the time, I was right there beside Mike, and we did indeed make most decisions together, side by side. He did his part, and I did mine. Mike’s belief in me and my knowledge reinforced my own strength and confidence just as surely as my trust in him and his capabilities reinforced him.
When Mike got sick, our roles changed. I went into caregiver hyperdrive steamroller mode, and I coaxed, cajoled and bullied him into living the best life he could despite cancer. It caused us to go nose to nose more than once! But he never let me forget that HE was still there, inside the illness, and I couldn’t overrun him, as hard as I sometimes tried. He accepted and often even welcomed my fussing, researching and calorie-pushing, and he constantly credited me for helping to keep him alive through my efforts. But no matter how much I pushed – in the long run, every day, up to the very end, Mike ran his own show. And I learned so much from him as he did it.
In Mike, I found my leaning board. I found my partner, my teacher and my ablest adversary. I found my laughter and my sparkle.
And I found the creator of my life’s org chart…at 62.
At 62 