Parallel Lives Reunited

Now that's a different kind of love story.  There have been people who have married, separated, divorced and re-married, as for example the famous love affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, twice married through a tempestuous relationship.  This American couple, however, are not celebrities, but ordinary people who met in their teen years, fell in love and married.

They lived together as man and wife for twenty years, during which time they had four children together.  And that seemed to be long enough for both of them, since they divorced at that point and re-married.  Although they kept in touch in a distant, third-hand way, through their children.  Lena Henderson and Roland Davis are now 85 years old.

They are great-grandparents.  At least one of their children is a grandmother.  He began a career in the military soon after they met and married in their teens in Chattanooga, Tennessee, their marriage officiated by a justice of the peace.  It was all business; right after the marriage ceremony "He went to work and I went home", Lena Henderson explained.

They sundered their marriage in 1964.  And then saw one another briefly at a family funeral in 1996.  Roland Davis was living in Colorado.  His second wife died in January; he obviously enjoyed a much longer second marriage than his first.  As fortune would have it, his first wife, Lena Henderson had also experienced the loss of her second husband.

He proposed to her over the telephone a few months back, and she accepted his proposal, even though they hadn't seen one another since 1996.  He has since moved from Colorado to Buffalo, New York, where Lena Henderson now lived.  And they're getting married in Buffalo, in a church.  And their children are extremely happy.

"It's every child's dream, every child who has ever been in a family where divorce has occurred, that your parents would come back together", said their youngest daughter.  "We are all so ridiculously excited.  We're like little children again."