National Public Radio host Diane Rehm married John Hagedorn this past weekend at Washington National Cathedral. From The Washington Post:
Diane Rehm and John Hagedorn were married Saturday at Washington National Cathedral in front of their families and 250 friends. The bride, 81, walked down the aisle with her son and daughter. The groom, 78, waited for her with his two sons.
They were, said the Rev. Canon Jerry Anderson, the oldest couple he had married in his 49 years in the clergy. “They say that marriage is actually the triumph of hope over experience,” he told the congregation. “It’s obvious God is not finished with the two of you.”
Marriage is not something to be entered lightly, especially when you’re mature enough to know exactly what that really means. So the ceremony was traditional, serious and formal: The bride and groom vowed to love, comfort and honor but not obey.
The marriage was not what Rehm had in mind when she was widowed after 54 years of marriage to John Rehm:
Then fate intervened in the form of Hagedorn, a retired Lutheran minister and widower. The two met 30 years earlier at the wedding of a friend they had in common and reconnected at a book reading of Rehm’s “On My Own” last year. On their third date, he told her he loved her.
“That’s ridiculous,” she answered. “How can you possibly know that?”
‘That’s what I feel,” he said.
But Hagedorn’s honesty and optimism cracked open her heart to him. “Do I want to spend the rest of my life alone?” she thought. “When I met John, I thought, ‘Maybe not. Maybe not.’ ”
The couple will be living between his home in Florida and her home in Washington, D.C.
Previous Cafe coverage of Diane Rehm:
Diane Rehm to retire from public radio
NPR’s Diane Rehm a voice in end-of-life debate
Bishop Budde on Diane Rehm Show
Photo credit: Tony Powell, in the Washington Post story