Blog 357 - 30 August 2026 - The Wedding Vows No One Heard

Margaret and I were married three times in front of witnesses.

But none of those ceremonies was our real wedding.

Our most important wedding ceremony was the one to which nobody else was invited. There was no celebrant. No family or friends. No photographer. No flowers, wedding clothes or carefully chosen music.

There were only two people – just Margaret and me.

And we were still in bed.

It was about seven o’clock in the morning of Saturday, 22 March 2008. I had just woken and Margaret was still asleep beside me, breathing softly.  She was completely unaware something had changed inside me.

That morning, Margaret and I made promises to each other that nobody else would hear.  They became the foundation of our remaining life together - fifteen years.

I know our vows helped keep Margaret alive through years of terrible illness when, on many occasions, she probably should have died.

Before and after Margaret died, the same promises were the major reason I remained alive.

The promises were our sacred vows.

This is our story. 



Margaret celebrating her 60th birthday in 2010.



Top photo - Margaret and me in about 1999.  Next photo - Margaret in 2000 at Victor Harbor, south of Adelaide. 

Margaret always adopted a tough-woman exterior.

It deceived absolutely no one.

Five seconds talking to Margaret was always long enough to discover the extraordinarily kind and generous woman she was.

That was Margaret.

When March 2008 began, neither of us was looking for another marriage.

We had been living together for almost ten years and had never discussed getting married.

There were very good reasons for that.

Margaret had been married three times before and e Each marriage had ended badly.

I had been married twice before and both of mine had also ended badly.

Between us, we had enough evidence to conclude that marriage was not be one of our particular talents.

But what Margaret and I had were when we were together was so different.  It worked.

We loved each other; we were happy. We had built a joyous life together.

Why would we risk changing it?

So, we didn't.

Until that Saturday morning in March 2008.


Margaret and me. This photograph was taken in about 1999.

In March 2008, Margaret and I were both still working full time.

Margaret was a specialist cancer nurse at Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, South Australia. Since 1982, she had been responsible for establishing and ensuring the smooth operation of the Haematology and Oncology Day Unit.

Margaret spent her working life caring for people facing cancer.

Long before I met her in July 1998, she had lost her eyebrows as a consequence of preparing chemotherapy treatments that were then administered to her patients.

I was still working full time as a lawyer at a major law firm.

Our life together was ordinary in many ways.

We worked; we came home; we lived our lives.

And we loved each other.

By March 2008, Margaret's health was still reasonably robust, although not quite as robust as it had been ten years earlier when we first met.

Neither of us could possibly have known what the next fifteen years would bring.

On Saturday, 22 March 2008, Margaret and I were still in bed at about seven o'clock in the morning.

I woke before her.

Margaret was sleeping beside me.

I lay there listening to her breathe.

And waves of love washed over me.

My mind wandered back through the failed marriages we had both experienced and then returned to the life Margaret and I had shared every day since meeting in 1998.

Then something that should have been obvious for years became clear to me.

I did not want a life that did not contain Margaret.

I did not want to live in a world in which Margaret did not live.

All my fear about another marriage ending disastrously disappeared.

I knew I wanted to spend every day of the rest of my life with this woman.

Now, being frightened of making that commitment seemed so incredibly stupid.

I wanted Margaret to know that there were no circumstances in which I would ever walk away from her.

I wanted to be able to call Margaret my wife.

Most importantly, I wanted her to know that I was her husband and would remain her husband for as long as we both lived.

There was only one problem.

Margaret was still asleep.

So, I woke her up.

I had already worked out how I was going to make the idea of marriage more attractive to her.

Ireland.

Margaret loved visiting Ireland.

And I loved going anywhere Margaret wanted to go.

I suggested that we celebrate the love we had already shared for nearly ten years by getting married there.

That woke her up.

I asked Margaret to marry me.

She said yes.

It was the only answer I wanted.

I held her tightly in my arms and was so filled with joy.

But almost immediately, I realised there was something I wanted to do before Ireland.

Before the ceremony.

Before the witnesses.

Before anybody else became involved.

I asked Margaret whether we could exchange our own wedding vows right there, while we were lying together in each other's arms.

She agreed.

And so we did.

I vowed that for as long as I had breath in my body, Margaret — and only Margaret — would be the centre of my life.

Margaret vowed that for as long as she had breath in her body, I — and only I — would be the centre of hers.

I promised Margaret that for as long as she lived, I would never commit adultery.

Margaret made the same promise to me.

I promised that for as long as Margaret lived, I would never separate from her and would never seek a divorce.

Margaret promised that for as long as she lived, she would never separate from me and would never seek a divorce.

There were no witnesses.

Nobody applauded.

Nobody signed anything.

Nobody even knew what we had done.

But Margaret and I knew.

And we both understood exactly what those promises meant.

They were sacred.

More than a year later, on 30 July 2009, Margaret and I publicly declared our love for each other in two separate ceremonies at Killashee House in County Kildare in the Republic of Ireland.

To everyone who attended, those were our wedding ceremonies.

Only Margaret and I knew differently.

We had already married each other in the way that mattered most to us.

That had happened sixteen months earlier, in the privacy of our bedroom, when two people who had both experienced failed marriages decided that this time they would make promises they intended to keep for the rest of their lives.


Part of the gardens at Killashee House, Naas, County Kildare. I took this photograph in 2019 when Margaret and I returned to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary.

It had rained heavily in Ireland throughout July 2009.

But on 30 July, at Killashee House, it did not rain.

I believe there was a reason for that.

God knew something nobody attending our wedding knew except us.

Margaret and I had already exchanged our sacred vows.

That day in Ireland was our opportunity to declare publicly the love and commitment we had already promised privately to each other.

Our Marriage Certificate remains one of my treasured memories of Margaret.

It is written in both Irish and English.

It is framed.

And it still hangs on the wall of my bedroom.

 


Margaret on the morning of Thursday, 30 July 2009, only a few minutes before we got into the taxi that would take us to Killashee House to publicly exchange our vows.

Neither Margaret nor I ever broke the vows we made to each other that Saturday morning in March 2008.

Not in deed.

Not in thought.

And something happened because of that.

Our love became stronger.

Year after year, through circumstances neither of us could have imagined when we first made those promises, our love continued to deepen.

The vows that seemed so simple while we lay together that morning eventually demanded much more from us than either of us could possibly have understood at the time.

Between our exchange of vows and our wedding, Margaret became terribly ill.

And she remained terribly ill for fifteen years.

There were many times when Margaret's health should have taken her from me.

There were also times when my own health collapsed and my life should have ended.

Yet somehow, we continued.

I know our love for each other was an essential part of the reason.

And I know the sacred promises we made that morning gave our love a strength it might otherwise never have possessed.

When you promise another person that you will remain beside her when life is good, the promise is easy.

You discover what the promise actually means when life stops being good.

Margaret and I soon discovered exactly what our promises meant.

By August 2023, the woman I had woken next to on that Saturday morning fifteen years earlier had endured more pain than I would ever have wished another human being to endure.

By then, our lives were completely different from the lives we had imagined when we exchanged those vows.

But one thing had not changed.

Margaret was still the centre of my life.

And I was still her husband.

On Tuesday, 22 August 2023, I was with Margaret in the Intensive Care Unit at Ashford Hospital.

I held her in my arms.

And I wept as she died.

The monitor beside Margaret's bed said it was 3.16 am when her pain finally ended.

After so many years of terrible suffering, Margaret was at last pain free.

When Margaret and I made our vows in March 2008, I thought I understood what I was promising.

I didn't.

Neither of us could have.

We could not see the fifteen years ahead of us. We could not see the hospitals, illness, fear, pain or loss that would eventually test every word we had spoken.

We only knew that morning that we loved each other.

And we made a promise to each other.

Then we kept that promise.

Margaret kept her sacred vows to me until the final moments of her life.

I still keep the vows I made to her.

The love between us was stronger when Margaret died than it had been on that morning when we promised ourselves to each other fifteen years earlier.

Death ended Margaret's pain.

But it did not end what those vows mean to me.

And it did not end our story.

In the Blogs that follow, I will tell more of that story — and explain why I believe the promises Margaret and I made to each other when nobody else was listening, helped keep both of us alive long after either of us should have been.

Because sometimes the most important promises we make are not the ones the world hears.

They are the ones we keep.

 

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