It was just 15 short years ago that my grandmother died. Together, she and my granddad raised four kids. Together, they celebrated the birth and lives of eleven grandchildren, of which I was celebrated grandchild number five. My granddad, a PFC in the army who was stationed in Germany during the Korean conflict shortly after marrying my grandma, didn't meet his firstborn son until the boy, my uncle, was six months old. Granddad and his family became part of a place and part of each other. I lived most of my growing-up years next door to granddad and grandma. I walked across the small yard that separated our two houses to watch old movies, make homemade play-doh, eat big Sunday lunches, and help shuck corn or can green beans when it was time. I saw my grandparents cultivate a garden together, sing in church together, watch football together, and suffer together through the pain of the cancer that eventually took my grandma's life. My granddad embraced every bit of it with grace and dignity.

It wasn't long after grandma's death that I walked into my grandparent's kitchen late one night. All of the lights in the house were off. I thought that no one was awake, and I was trying hard not to disturb the family's hush. I walked by granddad's door and was surprised to hear his voice. He was praying. And he was crying. I heard him say clearly and strongly through the tears, "I sure do miss her, Lord." I quickly moved away from the door, understanding nothing of his heartache but intuiting enough to know that I needed to leave him alone in the sacred seclusion of his night, his prayer, his marriage bed, his loneliness, and his grief. They belonged to one another.

Though I never saw them quarrel or bicker, and though I never knew them to struggle against one another, I now know just enough about marriage to know that there is nothing particularly easy about the arrangement. It is an awkward and demanding partnership. A relationship like theirs - hale and hearty - does not develop without labor, loyalty, sacrificial choices, and seasons of strife. It doesn't come without the shared belief that the two belong to each other.

I cannot consider my own marriage for long without reflecting on sacramental language. Marriage is a Eucharistic wine, sweet and bitter all at once. Honey on the tongue and fire in the throat. Marriage is broken bread, a single portion being torn apart and crumbled daily to sustain two often weary, hungry lovers. Marriage is the yawning, cold water of baptism, the very image of continual death and continual rebirth, a meandering current full of new occasions to live unto one another but only after voluntarily drowning in the stream. Marriage is baptism into another person - by ceremony and sex, by gain and loss, by laughter and tears, by fulfilled and crushed dreams, by met and unmet expectations, by shouting and silence, by seasons of plenty and paucity, by erratic alterations and stubborn consistencies. Marriage is communion of body with body, mind with mind, will with will. It demands everything each partner has and in return generously promises more than just the sum of two lives. But the substance of such a promise will be realized only after vows have been kept to their end -  those better-or-worse, richer-or-poorer, in-sickness-and-in-health vows.

The truth is, as nice as all of that sounds, it's hard as hell. The words of the vows that foresee the worse, the poorer and the sickness make hope's promise hard to believe. Hope is fragile, after all. What we hope for is not at all fragile, but the hope itself can be knocked down, pressed, and cracked easily enough. For a marriage to survive, those fissures must be acknowledged. Many are frightened by fractured hope, believing that it is evidence of unalterable failure or inescapable ruin, but the chips and faults that blanket the surface of a couple's belief in hope's promise are confirmation of nothing more than that two people have chosen to live their lives in such close proximity that crashing into one another is an inevitability. In other words, it is to be expected. It's the nature of the thing, but such a nature is rarely recognized from the beginning of the marriage. A naive young couple stands in tux and gown, glowing with expectation, believing that for them, unlike every other couple who has stood where they now stand, it will be easy. Or if not easy, then at least their affection for one another will render their struggles powerless. Little do they know that it is their affection for one another that will invest their battles with so much fierceness, but it is the same affection that will empower them to fight with all of their heart and soul to realize the promised hope of life together.

When two belong to one another, they accept and make room for the fragility of the relationship. It is met with readiness. It is owned without regret. It is protected with ferocity. Partners who honestly grant the delicacy of life together need make no apology for those seasons when they must fight to remain together. They don't wear their struggles with shame but with pride. They own their conflicts, and they glory in their victories.

If owning marital struggle is the Eucharistic wine, then owning each other is the baptism. Becoming members of one another means that the whole life of the partner - the delights and pleasures, the annoyances and irritations, the miseries and diseases - is taken into the life of the other. The tears of one become the tears of the other. The joys of one become the joys of the other. There is no private depression or private ecstasy, no private disease or private euphoria, no private intention or private negligence. I cannot deny that I have my wife's ambitions and her impairments any more than I can deny that I have my father's eyes. They are a part of me, and this too is the nature of the thing.

The Earth and its God belong to one another. The Church and the Christ of its faith belong to one another. The farmer and the field belong to one another. The cloud and the sky belong to one another. And two people, bound by the baptism of love and fidelity, belong to one another.

My granddad eventually remarried. This, I believe, is a testimony to the beauty of the promise of life together. He had experienced the fullness of marriage, with its disposition to remove the innocence of the young unknowing couple, and found that what was left was to be desired far above the erstwhile naivete. Even the pain of witnessing his beloved fight a losing battle with cancer revealed the savage and unfailing beauty of the sacrament of marriage for two people who persistently decide to belong to one another.