A Promise Kept

This episode of "A Pane In The Glass Podcast" is about a promise made over 45 years ago. It was about the future and what it might hold for Jay & Mavis Leno. You might recognize the name Jay Leno from his many years as host of NBC's "Tonight Show" but to hear Jay, it was his wife Mavis who was the more interesting person in their relationship. As Jay says in this narrative, a promise to love for better or for worse usually assumes it will be for the better which is not always the case and it certainly isn't for Jay & Mavis. But the promise made is one Jay was going to keep!

Transcript

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Welcome to a very special episode of a Pain in the Glass podcast. This is your host, Bill Shearhart, chartered professional coach with coaches of Canada, once again coming to you from my home in Grand Bend, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Huron, and on the ancestral lands of the kettle and the stony point First Nations. The title of the episode today is about a promise. A promise for better or for worse. And the person who made that promise 45 years ago was someone that many of you will recognize, especially if you are of a certain age and enjoy late-night television, the tonight show, and the host, Jay Leno. Well, Jay's going through a very difficult time in his life with his wife, Mavis. She's suffering from dementia. This is their story about the promise they made to one another. Every single morning for three years, Jelano's wife woke up, believing her mother had just passed away. And every single morning he held her while she cried as if the loss was brand new. Then he got up, made her breakfast, and came back the next day to do it all over again. Her name is Mavis. They have been married for more than 45 years. Before dementia began stealing pieces of her, she was a formidable woman, a fierce advocate who spent years fighting for the rights of women living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Her work was serious enough that she was once considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. She traveled the world. She had strong opinions and the voice to make them heard across any room. Jay Leno, for all his decades in the spotlight and millions of nightly viewers, has said plainly and repeatedly that Mavis was always the more interesting one. In 2024, Jay filed for legal conservatorship over her estate. The diagnosis was advanced dementia. The disease had progressed to the point where she could no longer manage her own affairs. And he did not hide it. He spoke about it in interviews with the careful, measured language of a man who has had years to search for the right words for something that really has none. Dementia does not arrive like a sudden storm. It arrives like a tide that keeps coming in. Each time it pulls back, something that used to be there is simply gone, and you learn not to look for it anymore. The mornings were the hardest. Every day, without fail, Mavis would wake up and the news of her mother's death would hit her fresh, not as a memory, but as an event happening right now. She would cry the way you cry when someone you love has just died, because in every way her mind could register someone she loved had just died. Jay would hold her through the storm until it passed. Then the next morning the tide would come in again, and he would hold her through it again. This continued for approximately three years. He does not call it sacrifice, he calls it marriage. He has quietly rearranged the architecture of his professional life around her needs. He takes only work that allows him to be home the same day, or at most just one night away. He comes home every evening and cooks her dinner. They watch television together, animal programs, and travel documentaries on YouTube, because the real travel is gone. But the appetite for the world is still somewhere inside her, and he feeds it with whatever he has left. When he carries her to the bathroom, he has a name for it. He calls it Jay and Mavis at the prom. The two of them move slowly down the hallway, careful and close, and he turns it into a dance. She thinks it is funny and she laughs. He makes her laugh every single day, deliberately, as if it is a non-negotiable item on the list of things that must be done before the sun goes down. She still knows who he is. When he walks into the room, she smiles. She tells him she loves him. There is still fire in her, he says. She still growls at the television when something offends her. The woman he fell in love with is still there, accessible in the ways that matter the most, and he is paying close attention to every single one of them. Someone once asked him whether he was going to get a girlfriend now. He said he already had one. He talks about the vows, the specific words, for better or for worse. He notes that most people who say those words on their wedding day are quietly hoping the worst never actually shows up. They mean it when they say it, but they say it on a beautiful day, in a beautiful place, with everyone they love watching, and the worst seems very, very far away. Well, for Jay Leno, the worst showed up, and he is doing exactly what he promised he would do. He has said he hopes his story turns a light not just on him, but on the 50 or 60 million North Americans who are doing the same thing right now completely without recognition. They are caring for a parent, a spouse, a sibling, or a loved one who once knew their own name and sometimes no longer does. Nobody is interviewing them, nobody is writing viral posts about them. They are simply showing up every morning for someone who needs them to show up because that is what they promised. For better or for worse is not a line in a ceremony. It is what you do on a Tuesday morning when you carry the person you love down the hallway and call it the prom just to make her smile one more time before the day ends. If someone you know comes to mind when you've heard this, send it to them so they know they're not alone.