On the morning of his wedding day, a half century after he first met the love of his life, Stephen Watts lay in bed feeling anxious.
A favorite 1960s Western played on the TV at the foot of the bed. A navy suit and starched shirt hung on a hook nearby.
“I’m just a bit scared right now,” he said.
His were not the typical pre-wedding jitters. Watts has had two strokes, and he’s an amputee who had once been homeless. Because of his frailty, he had barely left his room the last year. He’d been outside only once.
But elsewhere in the house, amid the whirl of activity, the love of his life, Jeanne Gustavson, was putting on a pale blue dress, checking her makeup and getting ready for a day she’d wanted for 43 years.
“Because I love her a whole lot, I can’t run — not from this,” said Watts, whose words often spill out in a slurred whisper. “She’s everything I ever wanted. No one in their right mind would leave her at the altar.”
And so Watts, 72, and Gustavson, 69, got married Saturday, 43 years after she broke off a relationship that began when they were both students at Loyola University Chicago — a decision she’s regretted all of her life.
It took six people to lift Watts into a wheelchair and roll him down a ramp into the couple’s sun-dappled backyard in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, where the couple now live. Gustavson came next. After all this time, Gustavson wanted it done the right way — so the groom hadn’t seen her in the blue dress.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She squeezed his hand. He leaned into her side. The guests’ eyes misted over.
“You’re my soul mate, my best friend, and I want to spend forever with you,” said Gustavson, reciting her vows.
“The first time I saw you, my heart whispered, ‘She’s the one.’ My heart was so right,” Watts said.
Gustavon’s brother, Tony Mathis, who’d driven from Southern California in a huge RV with his wife and three golden retrievers, pronounced the couple man and wife. The bride bent down to kiss the groom — twice. Or was it three times?
Gustavson first met Watts back in 1971, when they were both students at Loyola.She fell madly in the love with the tall “hunk” who was president of the college German Club.
But there was a problem: He is African American, and she is white. She lived in Mundelein with her mother and grandmother, who didn’t allow Black people in the house unless they were there for work. So the romance had to be kept a secret.
In college, Gustavson once went on a double date with her lifelong best friend Clare Drexler, the bride’s maid of honor Saturday. They went to a concert at Ravinia, putting Gustavson at great risk of being seen by someone who might tell her mother.
Secrecy was “not the way it should have been; it made me very sad,” Drexler said this week.
Gustavson couldn’t keep the secret and eventually told her mother, who went “ballistic,” Gustavson said.
The mother’s racism and Gustavson’s hectic life of being a nursing student doomed a relationship that had lasted seven years. So Gustavson broke it off. Watts was devastated.
They married other people, both got…
Read More: A Chicago love story interrupted ends in a wedding 43 years later