"Woman, you lied to me"

[fuzzybuddy]

I'm on a nostalgia kick. It's so strange how some values change from one era to the next. I'm 70 now, so when my grandparents were born, they didn't have birth certificates. Those records were kept in the family bible, if at all. My grandfather met and married my grandmother, who was 8 years younger than he was. He always called her , "my woman". They were a good pair. He'd be ranting and raving about politics. He did that a lot. My grandmother would say, " Now, Joe" and quiet him right down. And Thanksgiving at her house was so good. Oh, the food!! Unfortunately, she had diabetes and passed away. It was the last day of the viewing, and funeral director found out some information. They weren't too sure how to tell my grandfather. He was really old school. Turns out my grandmother was 8 years older than she thought-even slightly older than he was. They had the priest tell him in the back room. My grandfather came out and walked to the coffin that was holding his wife of many decades. He loudly said, " Woman. You lied to me. You lied to me". Yup, that's my grandfather.
He passed away within a year. The certificate said cancer, but it really was he didn't have his woman.
Yet back when a woman was considered a spinster, when she was 20; yeah, my grandmother lied.

 

[BlunderWoman]

Cute story You know I've seen that many times. It seems when married partners have been together so long the passing of one is not very far ahead of the passing of the other. I think it's just incredibly hard on them after so many years.

 

[Manatee]

My father was born in 1901 on a farm, no birth certificate. In 1940 he needed one for security clearance. He was able to get one retro-issued because there were people who remembered him in that area.

 

[fureverywhere]

Cute story Fuzz Things were indeed different back in the day. My grandmother had to drink some iron concoction for severe anemia as a result she lost her natural teeth by thirty. She also...gasp...tinted her hair...and even...I don't know if I can say it...possibly used cosmetics on her face. From what I've been told my grandfather was none the wiser to any of it.

We emptied his house in the early 1970's. He was moving in with my parents after some 90 years of independence. In the back pantry were boxes and boxes of hair color right where my grandmother had left it more than a decade before. My mother made it clear we would get rid of it and my grandfather must not know. Things were very different indeed.

 

[jujube]

My father was born in 1923, a home birth, and didn't have a birth certificate. When he enlisted in the Navy, he had to take his mother with him down to the recruiting office to sign an affidavit about his birthdate. He got some sort of retroactive one after the war.

My great-grandfather apparently had a brief affair with a lady at church; my great-grandmother never forgave him and refused to ever "sleep" with him again. My mother grew up in the same farmhouse as them and remembers hearing her grandfather begging her to sleep with him again. She said it wasn't until years later she realized what was going on.

I was reading an article once about a young college woman in the 1940's who was interviewing elderly women who had lived in the Victorian era regarding sexual matters for a thesis. She was talking to an elderly woman who said that she and her husband had never seen each other naked, nor had they ever talked about sex. She asked the old lady how her husband had indicated when he wanted sex and she said, "Well, he would approach me in bed and say 'Arabella, kindly arrange your linen.'"