When death do us part.

Byline: Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

The time-honored marriage promise, "till death do us part" has no meaning for Karl Martin.

The 78-year-old widower spends much of every day at Mount Vernon Cemetery, sitting at the grave of his wife, Betty Martin, who died Jan. 15 of kidney cancer. He reads to her and talks to her, occasionally getting up to wander a while among tombstones that date back to some of Springfield's earliest residents before returning to her side.

Through cold rain and hot sun, Karl's there. And he longs to be there permanently. Life without Betty isn't worth living.

"I want to go, too," Karl says. "Part of my daily prayer is for the Lord to take me, too."

He cries easily when he talks about his wife of 60 years.

"I'm sorry," he says. "She loved me so much. She showed it in just every way. We loved each other - we never did anything apart."

Delpha Camp, a licensed professional counselor specializing in "thanatology" - the Greek term encompassing death, dying and bereavement - says Karl Martin's situation may sound extreme, but such deep grief is not unusual among survivors of very long marriages, especially men.

"For one thing, we don't expect men to outlive women in a marriage," Camp says. "Also, men seem to be more emotionally dependent in the marriage relationship - traditionally, at least, they have been the breadwinners, while the women took care of the family's daily needs and social relationships. So when the woman dies first, the man is bereft not only of her companionship but the performance of daily duties."

For Karl, that love and welcome interdependence began at first sight.

"We met in February of 1947," he recalls. "She lived in Eugene, I lived in Springfield. I went with my parents to the Full Gospel Church downtown on Main Street, where we'd never attended before. I saw her across the room after the service - it was amazing - I looked off an angle to my left, and there was an aisle opened up between us and she was at the other end. She was looking straight at me. I thought, `She's the most beautiful girl in the world.'"

He even remembers what Betty, a curly-haired brunette, wore that day: "A kind of pink outfit with a white fur collar wrapped around her. I thought to myself, `She'd never go out with me.'"

They met formally the next Sunday and quickly became inseparable. "Then I found out, she said she loved me from the first, too," Karl says.

They married 10 months later, on Dec. 26, 1947, the ceremony bittersweet because their parents didn't show up in time. The young couple - he was 17 and she 18, Karl says - chose to drive to Vancouver, Wash., because their pastor was there for the Christmas holiday.

"My mom and dad and her mother were coming together, and their car broke down on the way," Karl recalls. "The ceremony was at seven o'clock, and we waited for them until six at the bridge over the Columbia River. When they didn't come, we finally gave up and went on without them."

He says he still regrets the circumstances of their wedding. "I always wished I had waited and earned more money and given her a nice wedding - I felt like I had robbed her of something," he says. "But she always said it didn't matter, that she didn't need money or things to be happy."

Even that young, Karl had a rsum. By then he'd done "heavy, hard work" on farms in the Springfield area and played guitar in country-western bands.

"The summer before we married, I worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day, for $1 per hour, trying to save up to get married," he says.

After the wedding, he switched jobs, driving truck for Lane County, followed by 16 years with Eugene Sand & Gravel, running heavy machinery. Later, he worked for Weyerhaeuser for 15 years, until his retirement in 1983. After that, he and Betty started their own carpet and upholstery cleaning business, which one of their sons, also named Karl, carries on.

They have two other surviving children, Vicki Rice, who lives in Chemult with her pastor husband, and Chuck, of Springfield. The couple's oldest son, Nick, died seven years ago of a heart attack at 52; he is buried next to his mother.

Karl and Betty "always were very, very close," says Betty Blazer, who along with her husband, Charles, is a longtime friend of the Martins. "They were several years older than I am," Blazer says. "I was 13 when I met Karl; he knew my sister's boyfriend, and he became friends with my father, who played banjo and mandolin. He was probably about 20 then, so he and Betty were already married."

Karl and Betty "kind of balanced each other out," Blazer says. "She was very softspoken, and whatever Karl came up with, she went along with it. They just seemed to agree on almost everything. Of course, they had normal disagreements - nobody can be in tune all the time - but I never, ever heard them be unkind to each other."

Karl says he and Betty "said we loved each other 30 or 40 times a day. We held hands all the time. We hugged a lot."

The young couple held hands "even when we were driving down the road - when it was straight," he says. "I would put my hand on her leg, and she'd take my hand in hers, and we drove that way."

Of course, the pair had occasional arguments, "because every couple does," Karl says. "But we always repented ourselves before evening. Betty was better at that than I was, but she taught me. She raised four children and one husband."

After years of being close socially, camping and going to the coast together, the two young couples drifted apart - "They had their family to raise, and we were just beginning ours," Blazer says - and then rekindled their friendship about 15 years ago.

"Since then, we've been in close touch, seeing each other, talking on the phone, visiting back and forth," Blazer says. "We're very worried about Karl since Betty died. I've never seen anybody as grief-stricken as he is. But I understand it - I went through something similar with my mother."

Not long after her father died, her older sister's husband also died, Blazer says. Her sister moved in with their mother, and the two older women became inseparable.

"We joked that they were like an old married couple," Blazer says. "Then my sister died, and my mother just started going downhill. She said she was so tired, she just wanted to `go home' and be with my dad and my sister. She was lonely. So I can understand Karl's feelings. But it makes me feel unhappy if he's just waiting to die."

He says he is, but Karl doesn't want anyone to feel sorry for him.

"I'm not feeling sorry for myself - I'm not on a pity trip," he says. "I just get so lonely and miss her. With all my heart, I just want to join her. And through our faith, we believe next time we meet, we will be together forever. Next time, there will be no tears or sickness or pain or parting."

That wasn't the way it was in this life. Betty suffered from cancer for about three years before she died, "renal cell carcinoma," Karl says. "For the last two to three years, I did most of the work around the house. The last five months, I was her caregiver around the clock."

He doesn't regret a moment of it. In fact, "I miss doing things for her," he says. "I would do it all over in a heartbeat, except I wouldn't want her back because I wouldn't want her to be sick again."

He finds comfort that he was with Betty to the very end, "holding her hand when she died."

Often, when he goes to the cemetery, Karl takes his Bible to read aloud as he sits by Betty's grave, and he describes his wife in biblical terms from the book of Galatians, chapter 5, verse 22-23: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control" - "and forgiveness," Karl says. "Forgiveness is not in here, and I don't know why - it should be - so I added it."

He admits he sometimes feels depressed, "but I think that's another way of saying `heavy,' and God in Isaiah says to `praise the spirit of heaviness,'" Karl says.

Martha Bullard, a licensed clinical social worker, agrees that when it comes to evaluating the bereavement of those who have been widowed after long marriages, it can be hard to distinguish between grief and clinical depression.

"Our culture is into instant recovery, and that isn't the experience for many people, especially these elderly who lose a longtime spouse," Bullard says. "Some people do have a more complicated loss experience; to them, it feels completely foreign to go into the future without the person they lost."

Encouraging those who have lost a loved one gradually to begin spending time with others - especially on a regular basis that can be looked forward to - sometimes helps people to move forward from unremitting grief, she says. "But of course, people who go through this loss aren't acting normally - things aren't normal," she says. "For some people, the first year alone is a time of milestones and anniversaries, and the second year is a time not only of mourning but moving toward facing a future without the one who has died. But that can't happen unless the person who remains can begin to imagine a future."

For some people, that never happens, Camp says.

"Sometimes, when elderly people experience a major loss, the effort to live just isn't worth it to them any longer," she says. "Sometimes the greatest help others can give is just to acknowledge the terrible emptiness in their lives."

Most people come to the point of finding a way to go on, but not everyone does," Camp says. "I believe there are people who literally die of a broken heart."

Karl doesn't know where he fits on that continuum.

"One day, I think `I'm good, I'm getting better,' and the next I feel that terribly, empty loneliness again," he says. "When my best friend died a year ago, I thought I knew how his wife felt, but I didn't. This has been good for me that way, because now I know how other people feel.

"It's just a dead, empty loneliness."