Stand By Your Woman

April 22nd, 2007 at 10:00am Michael Conniff 2

For no apparent reason, with no pattern discernible, I had a day whereby I saw man for what he really is.

What I saw was grace under pressure, and not in any Hemingwayesque sense—not with bullets flying or the beloved dying in childbirth or the fisherman in a boat against the most elemental forces of nature.

What I saw was something far more moving and eloquent and real: I saw men under pressure who refused to succumb. As always in stories of this sort, this story is about a woman and more than one.

All on the same day I heard from men who are standing by their women despite extreme illness, pain, dislocation, and even poverty. One man’s wife literally can’t breathe and she has been sentenced to death. Another man’s wife is facing cancer that could be fatal. Another man in my immediate circle who is helping his dearly beloved get through depression which can be the last straw if you’re not careful.

What do these men have in common?

If they packed it in, no one would blame them. If they passed their wives onto the next man or the next they would most certainly not go to hell. And all of the above happens below the radar of life: they receive no credit for what they are doing—no story in the newspaper, no visitation from “60 Minutes,” no trip to a tropical coast. This is just the stuff of life that makes you want to stuff it—plain, ordinary pain.

Poets should write of this and it makes me wish I had the chops of the Bard, sonnets that speak of love in what most would see as lives long ago lost. Maybe it’s better to leave it at this: to see the common sacrifice of a man for a woman in extremis as the lot of the common man.

These men are tortured, beleaguered, vexed, cursed, and beloved. These men are heroes, gods—and saints.

Entry Filed under: Carbondale, Aspen, Colorado, Family, Women, The West