I have never been afraid of romance, passion and the vulnerability that goes with it. If you are looking for it and it is not returned,  or not found,  it can lead to serious heartache and untold misery.  But when it is found it can lead to joy and almost everything that counts in life.  I hope that life does not even out,  because,  if it does, I am in for a long dark stretch.  I had 47 great years with Kat.  This story tells you what it is to be in love with your partner for 47 years.  Take the single  best day you have had with your partner,  multiply it by 365 days, then multiply that sum by 47 years.   That is one way, a good way, to look at my life with Kat.

Kathleen Antoinette Regina Graham (Kat)  and I (Robert Harvey Jacobs) should never have been married; should never have even dated. Marriage between Catholics and Jews was not common in 1968. Marriage between a Jew and a woman with 16 years of Catholic education was probably unheard of. And yet, we got married. Not because we were rebelling or had a need to establish our own identify, separate from our parents and siblings. We got married for the simplest of reasons, we fell in love. As for me, I didn’t have a choice; Kat did not give me a choice. I could no more not fall in love with her than stop breathing. I can’t say the same thing for Kat but I can say, I was the one she was waiting for.

Do you know what it is to be loved every day? To love someone every day? To have that love grow over the years and decades; most of the time not even thinking about it because it as much a part of you as your heart or your brain? That was my life with Kat, our life together. Kat was modest to a fault. She did not know that she was capable of great love and could inspire great love. She made every person she touched a better person; me (her husband), Jonathan (our son), her many friends, relatives, and co-workers. She brought joy into my life for 48 years and spread that joy to the people we both knew. I was at enough gatherings and parties with her to say that there is no doubt that she brightened every room she entered. If you want to laugh and cry, but mostly laugh, ask anyone who really knew her to tell you a story about her. Every room I was ever in with Kat I never doubted that I was with the most wonderful partner, with the greatest personality and the most beautiful. Many people agreed with me. Wherever Kat was, there was happy hour.

In almost all of the pictures taken of us with other people in the picture, Kat and I are standing or sitting next to each other. We were always together, sharing our lives. That seemed natural to us from the very beginning. The good things in life seemed better, sometimes amazing, because they were shared. The few bad things we encountered, and there were very few, become tolerable because they were shared.

This is not a story that ends happily;  Kat dies of metastatic lung cancer and I grieve; for how long,  that remains to be seen.   As I write this, Kat passed away less than four months ago.  But there was those 48 years before the sad ending.  A wonderful journey for Kat and I, filled with love and small adventures.  I hope that reading this is a similar journey for you.  At the least,  you will meet an incredible person and maybe fall in love at least a little, much as I did 48 years ago. As I write these words I like to think that Kat is guiding my hand, or, at least looking over my shoulder. She would never take any of the credit for anything I accomplished. But, of course, she always inspired me, as she does now.

This is Kat’s story and my story, inseparable, always and forever.