60 years ago
/Betty and I were married.
We met in a genetics class.
The event was the first meeting of the lab component of an upper level undergraduate course in genetics that I was taking as part of my graduate minor. As students arrived, they were told to pair up as lab partners. The even number of students in the room when I arrived had already formed pairs. For a brief period, I was the only student without a lab partner. A few minutes later, Betty Ellis arrived and we became lab partners. Coffee after class transitioned into study dates which evolved into a state in which we were considering marriage.
Betty obtained her B.S. degree before I received my Ph.D. She graduated in January 1963 and accepted a research assistant position at Southern Research Institute in Birmingham. After Betty began working in Birmingham, I learned that my application for a National Science Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical School in Jackson, MS had been approved. We needed to reach a decision about whether or not we were staying together. The wedding was in Birmingham the last day of August 1963.
The day after the marriage, we drove to Jackson MS in the 1958 black Chevrolet Impala convertible I had won in a poker game. Cousins Barry & Brent attached the Just Married Sign and tied the tin cans to the bumper.
Betty’s sudden and unexpected death occurred in March 2019. Sudden perforations of her intestine sent her into septic shock and her body was not able to cope.
I am grateful that Betty did not have a long sustained illness with lots of pain and that her death was relatively quick allowing her to avoid her nightmare of spending years in a nursing home unable to attend to her own functions and with loss of cognitive functions.
I will spend today remembering the almost 56 years we spent together and working to complete a book containing images of the family gatherings that were so important to her and that added immense amounts of joy to her life.