LIKE MOST COUPLES who have been together for many years, Joseph and Helen Green can finish each other’s sentences; almost instinctively know what the other person is thinking; and have seen the best and worst of times and each other.
But after 58 years, Joseph and Helen are still very much in love and recently celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary. In a time when couples don’t last 58 weeks, these two have weathered the storms of married life and have come out unscathed at the other end. Now in their twilight years – Joseph is 83 and Helen is 89 – they are enjoying their time as empty nesters.
Theirs wasn’t your typical love story – if anything, it was far from.
“I was working in St George and I had a young baby,” Helen said.
“I was passing by the house and heard this baby crying,” Joseph said. “Then when I got nearer I saw the father of the child beating her with a watchman’s stick. I beat him up and she had to tell me to stop.”
At that point Helen was so disillusioned about her relationship with the child’s father, whom she had moved out of her father’s house to live with, that she knew her only recourse was to return home.
“I left the baby’s father and went back home to my father,” Helen said.
Of Joseph, Helen said: “I had never seen him before.”
She said he followed her to her father’s house with the child. When she eventually learned that he was interested in her, after the way her relationship ended, she wasn’t interested in getting into anything with another man.
“I told him if he liked me he would have to do something because I wasn’t going to live with him,” Helen said adamantly. “I had a child for a married man already and I wasn’t going to get involved with another man.”
After a year of courting, Helen and Joseph did eventually get married. Joseph accepted Helen’s son and helped to raise him as his own.
As the years passed, the couple had their own children, four girls and one boy. Their lives meshed more, with Helen abandoning her own church at Mount Tabor to adopt Joseph’s Belair Seventh-Day Adventist Church as her own.
The years, though, weren’t always good to them, and even saw a period when Joseph started getting involved with other women and actually left home for two years.
“My success wouldn’t be like others because he really wasn’t with me all the time,” Helen said. “Sometimes he would run about with his girls and come in when he like and the children accepted it. When he came home the children would open the door and I never stopped them. He was away from home but I had the children to keep my company, so I never used to pay him any mind at the time.”
After his escapades had run their course and having had to spend a brief period in hospital, Joseph returned home.
“It don’t matter wherever you roam. Whenever you’re done, you have to go back home,” a penitent Joseph said.
When he did eventually return home, Helen forgave him and he never stepped out on her again.
“If it wasn’t love, the two of us wouldn’t have made it,” Joseph said of their 58-year marriage.
“Sometimes it was smooth, sometimes it was rough,” Helen said. “Sometimes you get a little quarrelling but you don’t hold out. But we survived in Jesus’ name.”