This is what happily ever after looks like: Garth Peterson, who is 83, sits next to his wife, Clara, in a dining room at a Burlington nursing home, cutting the roast turkey on her plate into thin slices. He is slim, his hair white but still as neat and trim as it was in high school, when they were dating.

She was a “skinny little cheerleader,” he likes to say, three years younger. Her senior year, she was voted most likely to succeed, most cooperative, best dressed, best driver and several other silly honorifics forever memorialized in her yearbook. As Garth says, “She was everything.” They eloped when she was 19.

Clara has Alzheimer’s disease now and lives at Birchwood Terrace Rehab and Healthcare, six miles from the South Burlington home the couple bought 55 years ago, where Garth still lives. He spends four or five hours with her several days a week, always arriving in time for lunch.

“Clara, open wide,” he says and feeds her a bite of turkey. “Taste good?” She chews, quiet but content.

She sits in a wheelchair and wears a wide cloth bib long enough to double as a napkin on her lap. When Garth hands her a glass of milk, she drinks without help and doesn’t spill a drop, but Garth handles the silverware, patiently working his way around the plate, from the turkey to the rice pilaf to the mixed vegetables and, finally, to the chocolate brownie. Sixteen other residents eat lunch, most with assistance, in the memory-care dining room on this January Monday, when Garth will be among the last to return a tray.

“I love this,” he says, while they’re still on the turkey. “This is just something that I love to do.”

To Have And To Hold

No couples know what they’re signing on for when they stand before God or a judge or a justice of the peace and promise to love ’til death do us part. There’s no fine print on a marriage license. No disclaimers or list of possible side effects. Most couples are still high on exciting new love when they take their vows. Good times and bad, sickness and health are just words that come before the kiss.

Rom-coms and fairy tales end at the altar. Romance novels need an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending,” advises the Romance Writers of America. But in real life, the wedding is just the beginning.

Love looks different as years pass. After 51 years of marriage, Clara, then a 70-year-old wife, mother and retired teacher with a master of education degree, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The disease only gets worse. It’s hard to find emotional satisfaction and optimism with that plot point. Garth cared for Clara in their home for nine years before she moved to Birchwood Terrace last March. To love has meant to bathe, to dress, to feed and to continue to cherish.

“I love you,” Garth regularly tells Clara, who speaks very little now. “Do you love me?” Her blue eyes light up when he says that. She smiles and tilts her face toward his. “Mm hm,” she says on some days. “I do,” she says on better ones.

Garth and Clara have been together for 67 years. He was a junior at Waterbury High School and she an eighth grader at the middle school next door when she caught his eye. He had known who she was, the third of Malcolm and Dorothy Joslyn’s four daughters. Their families attended the same church. Her sister Diane was in his class and Donna two years behind. The Joslyn girls were popular, pretty and smart.

“If you could get a date with a Joslyn girl … you were doing well,” Garth said.

All those years in church, he had thought of Clara as a little girl. Spotting her between classes one day, he reconsidered. When he and Clara began dating, their age difference raised eyebrows — girls in his class called her “the diaper kid.” But the slight didn’t deter the couple. Garth and Clara have been together ever since.

They both rode the team bus to away basketball games, though they didn’t sit together. She sat with the other cheerleaders, and he sat with the players as the team manager. But, he said, “I always knew where she was.”

On date nights, Garth would borrow his parents’ car and take Clara for root beer floats at the A&W in Montpelier or to a movie at the Capitol Theater or the Sunset Drive-In in Colchester. When he brought her home, he was required to park in the driveway to give Clara’s parents a clear line of vision lest the young couple linger in the car. Her parents needn’t have worried. “We didn’t do any of that stuff,” Garth said.

Sometimes they double-dated with Diane, who was dating Garth’s best friend. And sometimes they took along Ramie, Clara’s younger sister, who was 7 when they started seeing each other. Ramie recalls sitting on a box in the back seat at the drive-in. Garth and Clara, she said, never made her feel like a pest.

After graduating from high school in 1959, Garth studied accounting at the University of Vermont. He didn’t join a fraternity because he went home to Waterbury Center every weekend to see Clara. “I was so in love with that girl,” he said. “She was a gift from heaven.”

She won a scholarship to UVM, but Garth wanted to join the U.S. Air Force after college and didn’t want to wait three years for her to relocate with him. He persuaded her to enroll in a two-year X-ray technician program at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington. When he finished his degree in 1963, a year before Clara’s program ended, he expected to be drafted into the U.S. Army. Knowing that married men were exempt, Garth and Clara eloped. Because Clara was so young and her parents so protective, Garth asked for her father’s blessing in advance, but they didn’t tell his parents until they were married.

With one of her school friends along to witness, they drove to the Charlotte home of a justice of the peace the night of October 16, 1963. After the brief ceremony, Garth took Clara and her friend back to their dorm.

He and Clara married in a church two months later. They honeymooned in Montréal, where they stayed for two nights at the luxurious Queen Elizabeth Hotel. And to hear Garth tell it, life has been a dream ever since.

‘Everything a
Marriage Should Be’

Yearbooks and photo albums trigger only happy stories. Garth enlisted in the Air Force as planned, and his six years of service took the couple first to Texas, where they drove a red convertible. In Tacoma, Wash., they bowled in a Monday night couples league. “And did we love bowling. We couldn’t wait for the weekend to be over with,” he said. Finally, in Hawaii, they had bonfire parties on the beach and popped corks on the lanai.

“We learned about life together,” he said. “And boy, did we have fun.”

When he got out of the Air Force in 1970, he and Clara bought a two-bedroom ranch across from UVM’s athletic campus on Spear Street for $24,500. UVM hired Garth on the spot the day he interviewed to be a financial management trainee, and he spent the rest of his career at the university, first as assistant treasurer, ultimately as assistant controller.

“And I just loved it,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to get to work.” His earnest enthusiasm evokes the blinding initial optimism of Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, who greets his neighbors as he bounces off to work: “Good morning! Oh! And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening and good night!”

“I have the Holy Spirit in my heart,” Garth said. “My glass is always half full.”

When Clara couldn’t get pregnant and doctors could find no reason, she and Garth did not grieve, he said: “We knew we could always adopt.” And when Catholic Charities presented a baby boy born on October 16, 1972, the ninth anniversary of their elopement, they said, “He’s the one.”

Eric completed their family. Clara quit her hospital job to stay home with him until he started school. Then she worked as a teacher’s aide while attending Trinity College in Burlington to earn an education degree.

Around the time Eric graduated from high school, Clara graduated from Trinity and started teaching math at Peoples Academy High School in Morristown. Despite her hourlong commute, she studied at night to earn a master’s degree from Saint Michael’s College.

She and Garth split household chores 50-50. She cooked. He cleaned house. Or, as he likes to joke, “I told her what to do, and she told me where to go.”

Even during those whirlwind years, they managed to socialize, often with their “church family,” friends from Faith United Methodist Church. Year after year, they stood in line in the cold waiting to hear Jon Gailmor and other entertainers during Burlington’s First Night New Year’s Eve celebration. Come summer, they spread blankets at Waterfront Park for the city’s Fourth of July fireworks. They went to chicken pie suppers at area churches, shows at Saint Michael’s Playhouse, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations with the Joslyn family, and every UVM basketball and hockey game as members of the school’s Victory Club.

And on many wedding anniversaries, they went back to the “Queen E.” On their 25th, Garth gave Clara the diamond ring he couldn’t afford when they got married.

Garth has been the more gregarious half of the couple, friends say. His brother-in-law Bob West, who was Donna’s husband, recalled the two couples walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans when he and Garth were “laughing and carrying on.” At a food truck, West placed his order first, and when the clerk asked for his name, he said, “West.” He stepped aside, and Garth stepped up to order. The clerk asked for a name.

“And he said, ‘East,'” West said.

Friends say they’ve never heard a cross word between Garth and Clara. “You could see the respect that they felt with one another, the kindness and patience,” said Pat McGarry, a friend for 40 years. “Just everything that a marriage should be.”

A Pact with God

For years, unbeknownst to anyone, a protein called amyloid beta was amassing in Clara’s brain. Though neuroscientists debate Alzheimer’s exact molecular cause, most believe that the protein forms plaques that disrupt communication between neurons, leading to inflammation and cell death.

Eric noticed Clara’s symptoms first. His mother, who had always had an iron-clad grasp of the family calendar, started forgetting events. She began to repeat questions. Sometimes, when hearing an answer for the second time, she’d say, “Oh, yeah. You already told me that.” At other times, she reacted as if hearing the information for the first time.

Dementia runs in the Joslyn family. Clara’s dad, his only sibling and their mother all had it. Donna was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 59 and died at 67, five years before Clara’s symptoms appeared. So Garth knew where to turn. Neurologist William Pendlebury, medical director of UVM Medical Center’s memory center, diagnosed Clara with Alzheimer’s at her first visit.

“I want you to cure her,” Garth told God. Always a churchgoing man (save for those few Sundays when he went rabbit hunting with his dad), Garth lives for the Lord. “And I thought He would cure her,” he said. “Then I realized, that’s not what He was going to do.”

So Garth had another conversation with the Lord: “OK. I understand what you want, but I need your help, both physically and mentally, to take care of her. And I will, as long as I can.”

Alzheimer’s starts in the hippocampus, disrupting the formation of new memories. As it invades other regions of the brain, patients can get lost in familiar places and lose the ability to think logically, make decisions, plan and solve problems. In his support group, Garth has heard stories about other people’s wives trying to leave their homes in the middle of the night or lashing out at their husbands and accusing them of having affairs with a caregiver. Clara has done none of that. He feels lucky.

At first, the couple continued to travel, grateful for the fact that they had retired early and bought time-shares that took them to Florida, Aruba and Hilton Head, S.C. Clara did well. But Alzheimer’s continued its ruthless rout, robbing her of bladder control, eroding her language and restricting her mobility. Eric believes the steepest decline came during the first year of COVID-19. A South Burlington resident, he stood outside on the lawn or the driveway when he visited his parents. By the time a vaccination eased social restrictions and he allowed himself back in their house, his mother’s personality was largely gone.

When Clara could no longer climb stairs, Garth moved their bedroom to the first floor. When the tub became an obstacle, he installed a walk-in shower. He put furniture on risers, built a ramp from the garage to the house, and bought a recliner with a seat that raises and tips at the push of a button.

Eventually, he hired Visiting Angels to provide in-home health care for 12 hours a week, but friends saw his trademark energy wane. Eric worried. They all asked Garth, “If something happens to you, who will take care of Clara?” When he began talking about long-term care facilities, friends sensed that he was asking for permission to move Clara.

Garth, himself, was the last to grant it.

Bottom line, said his lifelong best friend, David Dibbell, “He’s still in love.”

The day Garth helped Clara into the car to move to Birchwood, he knew she’d never return home, but he knew it was time. “I was completely worn out,” he said. “I wanted to be her husband. I wanted somebody else to be her caregiver.”

‘You Are My Sunshine’

Paper snowflakes dangle from the hallway ceilings at Birchwood Terrace. A month into the New Year, Christmas trees, smiling snowmen and snappy gingerbread men, all colored in crayon, hang on the window in the memory care dining room, a décor likely similar to that of the elementary school across the street.

Brief bios of Birchwood memory care residents posted next to their bedroom doors note academic degrees, professional accomplishments, international travel and families. In the dining room, some cradle dolls when they wait for lunch.

When the food arrives on this Tuesday, Garth slowly circles Clara’s plate: from beef and cabbage casserole to cornbread and mixed vegetables. By the time they reach the pumpkin pie, all of the other trays have been cleared. “But when you’re in love, you don’t care,” he says.

At 2 p.m., musician Charlie Rice provides afternoon entertainment, opening his set of soft rock with “Feelin’ Groovy,” then moving through covers of the Eagles, Van Morrison and Sam Cooke. Garth and Clara used to win high school dance contests. Now their fingers interlock and he stares at her feet, hoping that the music will burn a path through the plaques and let the necessary neurons connect so she can tap to the beat. But her feet sit like lead weights.

When Rice sings “You Are My Sunshine,” Garth sings along, until the lyrics make him cry: “You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”

Rice thanks the audience for coming out. While he sings the Phil Collins love song “One More Night,” Garth’s eyes warm as he looks at Clara and taps her chin. “You’re so cute,” he tells her, still incredulous, after all these years, that the skinny little cheerleader fell for the team manager.