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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| The envelope from the IRS contained no condolences.'Just a bill.'$363,053.'Edith Windsor was 81 years old. She had a heart condition. She had just buried the woman she had loved for forty-six years—the woman she had nursed through thirty years of progressive multiple sclerosis, the woman she had married in Toronto two years earlier when doctors said there wasn’t much time left, the woman who had proposed to her in 1967 not with a ring but with a circular diamond brooch, because a ring on a woman’s finger in 1967 invited questions about a husband neither of them wanted to answer.'Thea Clara Spyer had been Edith Windsor’s wife.'The federal government of the United States did not see it that way.'Under the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government recognized only marriages between a man and a woman. Which meant that, in the eyes of the law, Edith was not a widow inheriting her spouse’s estate. She was a stranger who happened to receive property from someone named Thea Spyer. And strangers who inherit property pay estate taxes.'Spouses do not.'If Thea had been a man named Theodore, the bill would have been zero.'Edith signed the check. She sealed the envelope. She sat for a moment in the apartment where she and Thea had built their life together—the apartment in Greenwich Village where Thea had died in February 2009, in the same rooms where Edith had been her caregiver and nurse and partner through the long, slow cruelty of the disease that had taken everything from Thea’s body while leaving her mind and her love entirely intact.'Then Edith Windsor, 81 years old with a heart condition and a $363,000 tax bill, decided to sue the United States of America. Their story had begun in a different world.'New York City, 1963. Greenwich Village. A restaurant where two women met, danced all night, and understood immediately that something had shifted permanently. Edith was working as a pioneering computer programmer at IBM—one of very few women doing that work at that level in that era. Thea was a psychologist. They were both brilliant, both funny, both shaped by the particular experience of loving someone the world insisted you shouldn’t.'When Thea proposed four years later, she thought carefully about the ring.'A diamond on a woman’s finger in 1967 meant a husband somewhere. Questions would follow. So instead she gave Edith a circular diamond brooch—a secret promise, pinned over the heart, that only the two of them fully understood. Edith wore it for the rest of her life.'They built what they built: an apartment in the Village, a beach house on Long Island, forty summers, thousands of dinner parties, two careers running alongside each other through the decades. A life that looked from the outside like friendship, and was from the inside like everything.'In 1977, Thea was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis.'The disease moved slowly and without mercy. Over thirty years it took her legs, then her arms, until she could barely move. Edith became what she needed to become—caregiver, nurse, the constant human presence that makes it possible to live inside a body systematically failing. She did this not as obligation but as love, which is a different thing entirely, though it requires the same actions.'They kept dancing.'When Thea could no longer stand, Edith would settle into her lap and Thea would guide her wheelchair across the floor. This is the image that explains something essential about both of them—the refusal to let loss take more than it had already taken, the insistence on finding the version of the thing that could still exist.'In 2007, the doctors said Thea had less than a year.'They decided to get married.'Getting Thea to Toronto—where same-sex marriage was legal—required a medical team, specialized equipment, and the kind of determination that doesn’t stop calculating logistics because the logistics are difficult. Thea was quadriplegic. The journey was an odyssey.'They made it. On May 22, 2007, after forty years of a secret brooch and a kept promise, Edith and Thea were legally married.'Two years later, Thea died in their apartment, with Edith beside her.'Two years after that, the IRS sent the bill.'Edith’s friends told her to rest. They told her she had already given enough, that suing the federal government was work for the young and energetic, for organizations with armies of lawyers and decades ahead of them. They told her, gently, that she had earned the right to grieve quietly.'She didn’t care.'She wanted her money back. More than that—she wanted the United States government to say, formally and on the record, what she had known for forty-six years.'Thea Spyer was her wife.'She found a lawyer named Roberta Kaplan, who took the case without hesitation. The legal battle that followed required Edith to open her private grief to public scrutiny—depositions, hearings, government attorneys arguing in careful legal language why her marriage wasn’t real enough to qualify for the same protections as everyone else’s. She sat through all of it.'The case won in district court. Won again on appeal. And then, in March 2013, Edith Windsor—now 83 years old—walked up the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court.'She wore the brooch.'The circular diamond brooch that Thea had pinned over her heart in 1967, the secret promise that had traveled with her through forty-six years of a life the law had spent most of that time refusing to see. She wore it into the highest court in the country and sat in that chamber, a small woman in a modest scarf, while nine justices debated the definition of her marriage.'On June 26, 2013, Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered the majority opinion.'He wrote that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. He wrote that the law existed to demean and humiliate same-sex couples and their families. He wrote that the Constitution of the United States did not permit the federal government to treat Edith Windsor as a second-class citizen.'The government was ordered to return every penny.'With interest.'Edith received the call in her apartment—the same apartment where Thea had died, the same desk where she had written the check, the same rooms that held forty-six years of a life the law had just been ordered to acknowledge as real.'The refund was not really about the money.'It was an admission.'It was the United States government, in the most formal and binding language available to it, finally saying what Edith had known since a dance in Greenwich Village in 1963.'Thea Clara Spyer was her wife.'The marriage was real. The love was real. The loss was real. And the law, however belatedly, was going to have to treat it that way.'Edith Windsor lived four more years after the decision. She became, in those years, something she had never sought to be—a symbol, a figure, a face on the cover of magazines and in documentaries and at celebrations. She wore it gracefully, because she understood what she represented to people who had been waiting their entire lives for the government to stop pretending their families didn’t exist.'She died on September 12, 2017. She was 88 years old.'She died having done the thing that most people who are wronged never manage to do—she made the institution that wronged her admit it, in writing, in the highest court in the land, forever.'Not because she was powerful.'Not because she was young or loud or backed by the right organizations at the right moment.'But because she was an 81-year-old widow with a heart condition and a check she knew she didn’t owe, and she decided that was reason enough.'Sometimes justice belongs to exactly that person.'The quiet one. The grieving one. The one everyone told to rest.'The one who signed the check and then picked up the phone and said: I want it back.'And I want them to say why they took it. |
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