My wife, Johanna, and I celebrated ten years of marriage this summer. Our anniversary is the Fourth of July, her favorite day of the year. She’s that girl.

We’ve been together nearly twice as long as we’ve been married. Three children (today is Mary Lou’s ninth birthday!); five years living overseas (London, which Jo found chilly and damp; she also didn’t like the weather); another move from the city (DC) to the exurbs (Frederick, MD); scores, maybe hundreds, of baseball, softball, basketball, and football games (flag and tackle, boys and girls), along with all those little triumphs and heartbreaks that seem so huge in the moment; and a lot of laughs, even through the most challenging times (like this one). It’s been so much fun.

So much fun. That’s what my mom said, over and over, through her tears, the night my dad died. “It was so much fun.” They were married 37 years before cancer took my father just after his 62nd birthday. It wasn’t all hunky-dory, of course; no marriage is, and over a long marriage plenty of troubles will come from without and within. My dad and mom were both passionate people, strong in themselves and strong for the truth as they understood it to be. Their ten children are certainly testament to their passionate natures, and so were their fights. My mom did not back down. But she’d have taken 37 more years with that man in a heartbeat.

Johanna changed my life. Our love is, in the cheeky parlance of the tabloid press, a “May-September romance.” I’m much older than she is. But contrary to the stereotype, Jo has taught me a lot more than I’ve taught her. She’s the most interesting person I’ve ever met: a live wire, sparking with wit and mischief and insight; a real “people person,” who maps the world through the lives and connections of those she meets; and a fearless intellect who forms her opinions with fierce independence. She’s also funny as hell. And beautiful. And passionate. I never had a chance. And I’m a better man because of her. I’m more real, more authentic, because that’s the way she is, and I guess that’s contagious.

All this by way of saying that my life has taught me this: Love is the most powerful force in the universe. I believe love is real, not just an accident of how the particular atoms on this particular rock spinning around this particular star collided over billions of years. Love is real, even if those atoms had knocked around a little differently eons ago and there were no humans to fall in love at all. The universe itself was created out of love, by Love itself, in my belief. Love is the creative power, the healing power, the saving power.

When true love finds you, in whatever form—and whether it finds you early or, like me, late in life—there's only one thing you do: You hold on to it like your life depends on it. It does.

One more picture and the poem.

Us, ten years ago, to show the inevitable yet beautiful toll time takes on all of us, which is somehow part of true love.

And now our poem. It’s called, “The Coming of Light,” and it’s by the Canadian poet Mark Strand. I recited it at our wedding.

.

.

Even this late it happens:

the coming of love, the coming of light.

You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,

stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,

sending up warm bouquets of air.

Even this late the bones of the body shine

and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.