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Ispent fewer than 24 hours with my future husband before we became engaged.

Five long months later, on a sunny Saturday before Valentine's Day, we stood at the tall white-and-gold altar of St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church in Port Arthur, Ont. It was Feb. 9, 1946.

I expected to feel ecstatic. Instead, I found myself dabbing at tears. Tears of dread. Suddenly I felt too young to be marrying at 19, that "till death do us part" was too long, too uncertain a path. And then the pastor addressed me by the wrong name. I murmured the correction.

Despite my attack of bridal nerves, I kept repeating what the priest intoned, promising to "love, honour and obey" this tall, quiet man on my right. I recovered - the old snapshots taken as we stood on the church steps show me dry-eyed and gazing adoringly up at my handsome groom.

We were among the hundreds of thousands of couples who married shortly after the Second World War. We met one wartime Christmas morning on a crowded westbound Canadian Pacific Railway train filled with grumpy soldiers en route for holiday leave but late because of train breakdowns.

We spent about 100 minutes together. As I prepared to leave the train, Alf stood, pencil and a scrap of paper in hand, and asked me for my name and address. We wrote to each other for the next 3 1/2 years.

The second time we met - in early August, 1945, after he had volunteered for the Canadian Active Pacific Force - he asked permission to kiss me and I nodded my consent. After the second kiss he held my face between his hands and said, "You know - I want you to know - I want to marry you." My response was a lecture on the seriousness of marriage, emphasizing that we hardly knew each other.

After he reported to his

Manitoba base his letters arrived almost daily. Each one was a little bolder, a little more persuasive. Alf could have written the textbook on the power of a positive approach. When he came back to see me the next month on a 48-hour leave and asked me to be his wife, I said yes.

We started our married life on a spartan budget. We lived with my family because he was temporarily working for my father. We had a private bedroom - a tourist cabin about 50 metres from my family home. No bathroom. No electricity. A box heater took up much of the space in the centre of the room; it had two lids for cooking and a front opening for wood. Our weekly highlight was cooking Sunday breakfasts on it. I would fry bacon and eggs while Alf made the coffee. Dessert was usually enjoyed in bed.

My husband opened a rural service station and garage. I helped him by pumping gas, doing the bookkeeping and whatever. Alf assisted me with chores and rocked teething babies. Electricity arrived. We moved into a new, unfinished home the winter before our fourth baby's birth. It was a blessing to have warm floors. And a bathroom!

In 1960, he was hospitalized for two months with back problems. We discussed nursing and me. (I had been a nurse-in-training when I was diagnosed with pleurisy from tuberculosis and had to withdraw before our marriage.) Married women going back to continue their education was not yet commonplace in our area, plus we lived 50 kilometres from the hospital.

He was the one who made it work. When I was a second-year student nurse, a tourist asked our youngest what grade she was in, and she replied, "I'm in Grade 2 and so is my mummy!"

My graduation from St. Joseph's Hospital in Port Arthur was a family triumph. My husband, my children and my parents all helped me succeed. Later, I took courses part-time at Lakehead University and earned my bachelor of science in nursing degree the year after our youngest graduated from high school. My husband was by then a member of the local school board and finding joy in his active participation. Our lives were fulfilling. Our love remained strong despite life's challenges.

Whenever we were separated we wrote love letters. In the 1990s, I spent some time nursing in the North. In one of Alf's letters, he wrote, "I'll stop writing now before I climb into this envelope and go along."

Occasionally, I noticed hints that he had changed, but a diagnosis did not come until 1999: Lewy body dementia, which has symptoms characteristic of both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Short periods of alertness were present even in advanced phases. We made the most of them.

Mornings were usually his best time. We lingered over breakfast, read the newspaper and chatted. We walked most days until the last months of his life, when his legs lost their stability. Our goodnight kisses remained long.

After his death on Nov. 15, 2004, at our home, in which he adamantly wished to stay, I started rereading his ribbon-tied letters. Some were more than 60 years old. Those letters had won my heart in my youth and now, decades later, they comforted me in my grief.

They elicited memories of almost-forgotten tender times, of impulsive lovemaking on fishing excursions, of that full-moon night so long ago when he announced, "We're going to make a beautiful baby tonight." And of how his hand would reach out to caress mine as he lay in a hospital bed, still in our own bedroom, those last weeks of his life.

No month is easy now, but in February, our anniversary month, I think I miss him most of all.

Dolores Kivi lives in Thunder Bay, Ont.

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