The room is dark as Dayle hears the bed creak from her husband getting up to make his morning coffee. It used to be their morning coffee, but she can’t hold down many things in her sensitive stomach anymore. Drinking coffee would mean she would have to get up to use the restroom, and a cup of coffee isn’t worth the hassle. So now he only makes a cup of coffee for himself. Her eyes are still half shut as she hears the beeps and the mechanical flow of oxygen from her CPAP. She slowly opens her eyes and looks around the room that she’s lived in for the last 50 years, thankful to see it again.
She and her husband, Robert, who everyone calls Bob, bought the house in 1996 when they moved to live in Fort Walton Beach. Bob and Dayle first met in the Air Force.
Dayle saw him walk into a bar that she frequented with her friends and told them, “I’m going to marry him.” Her friends laughed it off as another one of her out-there ideas that she was known for. She approached him and challenged him to a game of pool; the loser had to buy the other one a drink, which Bob accepted.
Bob ended the night with a drink, and Dayle ended the night with less money than she could afford. But night after night, game after game, Dayle continued to challenge Bob in pool, and Bob continued to take what little money Dayle had for the drinks he won.
After spending more time together, Bob asks Dayle out on a date.
Dayle teasingly recalls how much of a gentleman Bob was: “I remember after one date he walked me back to my barracks, and he asked if he had permission to kiss me. No one ever asked if they could have permission to kiss me.”
When asked about when Bob decided to marry Dayle and get a ring, Dayle cut in and said, “I didn’t get a ring,” and Bob finished with, “The only ring she got was a telephone.”
Dayle answered the initial question with, “I was so loud he was probably afraid of me. I was bossy and loud and took control, and Bob was laid back, easy going, and everything comes up roses.”
Their friends doubted whether their relationship would last due to Dayle’s spitfire personality and Bob’s cool and calm demeanor. However, they balance each other like yin and yang: Dayle loves hard and loud, and Bob loves quiet and deep; they’ve been married for over 45 years.
They describe their early years in marriage as full of life lessons and learning to be committed. Bob explains, “It’s easy to give up, and people get divorced because it’s easy. You have to learn how to give and take,” and Dayle finishes his sentence with, “Even when you’re upset, giving up is never the answer.”
Bob and Dayle went through difficult times as new parents and newlyweds, and sought marriage counseling because they loved each other enough not to take the easy way out. Their time in marriage enrichment classes led to Dayle’s favorite memory with Bob: the counselors leading a group session asked the men what they love most about their wives. She described how Bob was shy and wouldn’t talk much in public unless it was with his friends. He would not talk or open up to a stranger.
She recalls his voice crackling and eyes welling up when a tear slid down his face. “He said it was for making him a father and giving him a daughter, with a tear rolling down her face in front of a group of people,” Dayle says with nostalgia. Bob let his walls down even in front of a group of strangers to explain the greatest gift Dayle gave him: his children, Karen Elizabeth, JoAnna Rose, and Robert Jack Jr.
Dayle and Bob fell into a routine where she stayed home with the kids, cooked, and cleaned, while Bob went to work and provided for the family. Even after Dayle left the Air Force, there was one bad habit that stuck with her: smoking.
Before she enlisted, she would casually smoke here and there and was fine with going a day without it. But in basic training, the only way to get out of formation was to go on a smoke break, where they had a smoke corner to go and sit in.
She claims, “The two things I learned in the military were how to smoke and drink beer.”
Bob didn’t approve of Dayle’s smoking and would carry around a water gun and douse out her cigarette, earning him the name “Fire Marshal Bob.” Even though Dayle doesn’t smoke anymore, the frustration from that time still comes out as she recalls how annoyed she would be with him for doing that or for taking her cigarettes.
Dayle tried to quit smoking over 100 times, but the final straw was when she woke up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe. “I went to the kitchen and lied on the floor before driving myself to the hospital at two or three in the morning to the Emergency Room. I never wanted a cigarette after that night, after that anxiety.”
The cigarettes laid the groundwork for her difficulty breathing, but a kitchen fire triggered the start of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Dayle was cooking in the kitchen when she got distracted by watching a game show on the TV, then she saw lights and a strange glow coming from the kitchen. She ran in to see the skillet she left on the stove on fire, and she yelled for Bob to come down from their upstairs office, where he was working.
He ran down and grabbed the skillet off the stove and threw it in the sink with running water. Their microwave, cabinets, and cupboards were pitch black. From that night forward, Dayle would become short of breath from making the bed or couldn’t go up the stairs without becoming winded.
COPD is a progressive disease that can’t be cured, but it can be managed to slow the progression of the disease and lessen the impacts of the symptoms. As her symptoms progressed, her and Bob’s roles switched, where he became her caregiver, which is something none of their kids were used to seeing.
“The children never saw that side of [Bob] for being a caretaker; they saw him as a fighter and a provider, but not a caregiver. He did take care of me when we were younger, and I would get sick, but I didn’t get sick often, so [the kids] didn’t see it.” She describes how Bob has taken up her job around the house, cooking and cleaning, since her disease has progressed.
When asked to describe ways that Bob takes care of her, Dayle says, “From A-Z. He even brings me my toothbrush at night and a cup of water so I can brush my teeth.” As she continued, she remembered another of her favorite memories of Bob.
Dayle had been intubated for ten days, and when she woke, she had a hard time understanding reality. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Bob in a red sweater with his head bowed down, and she asked, “Am I in Heaven?” She didn’t know if she was alive on Earth or if she had passed on, but in that moment, seeing the love of her life, she saw Heaven.
The longer they were married, the more “intertwined” they became, as Dayle explains. She knows exactly how Bob is feeling when he wakes up in the morning before he says anything.
Listening to how Dayle would speak up, take over Bob’s stories, or how she would pass a story off to Bob when she became winded brought tears to my eyes.
Bob and Dayle are my grandparents, but I call them Poppa and G.G.
I saw how their relationship dynamic changed as my G.G.’s disease progressed until her last breath. Their love reminds me why it matters who you marry.
I want to marry someone who will douse out my bad habits because they are concerned about my health and well-being. I want to marry someone who finishes my sentences. I want to marry someone who stays even when I’m sick and can’t leave the bed.
My G.G. knew she was going to marry my Poppa the moment she saw him. He was her first love, her protector, and her Heaven. She was his voice, the love of his life, and his favorite thing to wake up to every morning.
When they got married, they made a vow, “to love each other through sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part.”