“I kept my promise”
IN MY SHOES: Edwin Morales, 53, met Noemi Rivera when he was just 7 years old. They were both in the hospital being treated for various manifestations of cerebral palsy (“She had straight black hair, like a Chinese doll,” he recalls.) After losing touch and finding each other again as adults they eventually fell in love and “sitting in a Szechuan restaurant on the Upper West Side, he slipped a ring on her finger,” The New York Times reports:
Both families opposed a marriage, and nature itself seemed lined up against them. They used wheelchairs because of cerebral palsy and needed help taking care of themselves. Still, Mr. Morales said, “We made a promise we weren’t going to leave each other again.”
They eloped and were married in the city clerk’s office on a Tuesday afternoon in 1996. Their honeymoon was a day at Coney Island. His family got over being upset; hers remained estranged.
The other night, Mr. Morales, now 53, sat near his wife’s coffin at a funeral home on St. Nicholas Avenue and discussed the days of a life that people around them had found amazing – the cooing and the squabbling, the midnight changes of adult diapers, the audacious rocking and rolling through the streets of New York. …
After they were married, he and Ms. Morales got by on monthly Social Security checks. They had a home aide during the day but were on their own for the night. Noemi’s health problems made her dependent on her husband for the most basic things.
“Any woman would like to have a man like Edwin,” said Edith Henriquez, the family’s social worker. “He always made sure her lips were wet, that her hands were clean, that she got a drink.”
At the cemetery, Noemi’s father Ismael Rivera sought Edwin out. “I kept my promise. I took care of her,” Morales told him. Rivera replied, “Gracias,” and hugged him.
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