"Hail to the rest of the road!"

I became married on December 20, 2008, to she who has now become Melissa Grace Butler. While contemplating this action in the moments when I find myself able to reflect quietly in the stillness between waves of wonder and amazement, a tender realization affected me with quiet poignancy: I have died. I should say, perhaps more fittingly (and to the chagrin of my English teachers) that 'I has died.'

What do I mean by this? Well, it seems funny that out of all the marriage advice I received prior to my wedding, the piece that stuck out was realizing that something very fundamental within me was about to change. My marriage counselor helped me clarify my thoughts during one of our sessions on this matter. He asked me the terribly ambiguous question, "what is marriage?" Such questions are terrible for me, in that I realize immediately that even an irresponsible answer would take hours, and here he was wanting one in a matter of seconds. The nerve! I blurted out something to the effect that marriage was a union of a man and a woman wherein their fundamental beings were altered from two-ness to one-ness. With a smirk he agreed and said that's why it's a sacrament, that it involves God fundamentally altering what something or someone is.

I took this to heart, and wrote a section of my vows based on this idea of fundamental change. Amid this process, I encountered a truth that scared me deeply at first, but has since become something of a blessed notion: I must die. While I do not mean this literally, I do think the direct referential meaning of that phrase is closer to the truth of my situation than our common understanding. In other words, yes, I will continue to live as Hayden Butler. Yet something needs must change, does it not? We are talking about nothing short of the miraculous when we begin to think of two-ness becoming one-ness, right? If we paid attention in math classes, which regrettably I did but marginally, we would know that whole systems of beautiful mathematics are arranged on the truths that one is one and that two is two. So when God says two shall become one, we are dealing with a deep magic.

So I has to die. There is something about Hayden Butler and something about Melissa Grace that needs to die. No longer are we two but one. When it comes to Melissa, the referent "I" must now begin to lose some of its ingrained meaning, and part of our self-ness (not the same as selfishness)must die to allow room for something to grow that is more beautiful than either of us could achieve alone.

In my vows, I wrote that I shall share with my wife in, as Dante phrases it, "one sweet life divided" among two. Without her, I will perhaps live but a half-life. This must frighten me, and it does, but there is something tender and beautiful about it as well. I do not yet have more than an inkling about what this shall mean. I stand, as it were, with all my road before me; or, I should say, with all our road before us. So, as Van and Jean toasted yearly, so I shall now, "if it's half as good as half we've known, here's HAIL! to the rest of the road!"