Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Thalia Ludlow refilled her husband's tea cup and just for a moment wrapped her hands around her husband's hand … it was trembling slightly. Not since he had buried his son and his daughter had he been so shaken.
Robert Ludlow was an incredibly strong man – his military career alone was a remarkable record of strength, crowned by the promotions he did not take.
“Y'all made me wait ten years on becoming a major, but what I have found out is that I am an amazing captain, and I am content doing what I do best. Pass me over. Another man needs that promotion to be encouraged. I do not.”
Captain Ludlow had a terrible divorce behind him, and like all men betrayed like this was deeply hurt, but –.”
“She left me – multiple times with multiple men,” he said to his counselor about it. “I never betrayed her or my country or my children. I did the best I could by all of them. It wasn't enough, but I REFUSE to be worried about a fool's behavior. She's gone. I'm not taking her back, ever. Help me move forward.”
Captain Ludlow was badly wounded, but was capable of handling change, which in an aging man was a form of strength all its own. When it became mission possible to have a new wife, he had thrown his bitterness overboard and grabbed Thalia Green with the quickness, despite his friends all telling him the risk.
“Life is not without risk,” he said, and said the same thing a decade later when the lawyer told him: “Your retirement income and your wife's nurse income together may not be enough to fight the foster care systems of seven different states.”
“Well, life is not without risk, and I'll tell you one risk I don't have to take: hiring a lawyer who doesn't think I can do this. Good day, sir.”
Right wife, right legal team – Covid-19 reared its ugly head, but Captain Ludlow would not be denied, and snatched up his last grandchild and got legal guardianship just in the nick of time – it cost him his home, his car, his stock portfolio, but he cared nothing for the latter: he got out before the March market collapse and turned around and got back in right afterward in both stocks and crypto with the money he had left.
So: it took a whole lot to shake the steady hands of Robert Ludlow, so much that the time between the shaking of his hands and his body at the graves of his children to the time when he could let himself be relaxed – to work up the strength to be strong enough to say what he was feeling on top of feeling it – required two days. He was near his limit, and that meant the situation or situations had to be really bad, because he was an incredibly strong man.
This is why Mrs. Ludlow just poured him another cup of tea, let him feel her soft squeeze acknowledging but not pressing on him, and just sat down by him and shared the warm starry night with him as he slowly gathered his strength.