It is not what comes to mind when you stand at the altar. Even though many ceremonies specifically include it.

"In sickness and in health..."

But when you have no need to drink of the fountain of youth because your skin is still as smooth as tulip petals, making promises about illness seems very distant. Like investing in your retirement plan for that hypothetical circumstance of growing old. 

Yet bodies have a way of surprising you, or at least the microscopic invaders that bring otherwise hale ones to their knees. 

A friend described what the last month has been like at her house. 

"We got sick, together.  First came the Sweethearts' Sore Throat, then Lovers' Nausea, followed by Turtledoves' Flu, and capped by a shared diagnosis of Still Crazy Walking Pneumonia. We spent a lot of time together, horizontally, with heads propped to drain aching sinuses.  We did stuff.  We were miserable enough within ourselves that I would lurch up and bring him water or motrin, and when I cried, he would pat my shoulder with compassionate awareness.  The Lord finally led us to feel each other's pains, and it wasn't even too hard to get out of ourselves to do it, since viral and bacterial misery showed us initially that it could be done. We are tentatively and slowly mending.  Pneumonia symptoms are known to take time, up to a month, to leave behind.  But it's been so educational it was worth it, and I'm already feeling a little nostalgic about exiting the sickies' rocking chairs.  We can't stay in misfortune forever, cushioned by its novelty.  We have to return to the knockabout world of real daily marital and societal responsibilities.  But we can learn a lot from being sick, from our marriages being sick."

She feels as if Providence orchestrated the ordeal to shake them out of a stalemate. They had drifted apart, and were spending less and less time together. 

"One of us would growl, 'We never spend any time together,' and the other one would grump, 'Yeah, and if we did, what would we do anyway?' "

How about that. Even before her strength has completely returned, she sees the blessing in what probably did not feel like one.