Anything can be found at Walmart, and Beth and Wayne White knew that to be absolutely true. After all that’s where they found each other and nearly 30 years of love.
It started as a blind date. Beth worked in night receiving at the Wards Road Walmart, spending the nights unloading trucks and stocking shelves. One of her coworkers had worked with Wayne previously and thought they would get along well.
“I reminded her of him, and he reminded her of me,” Beth said. “We arranged to meet Black Friday morning at Walmart at 7 o’clock when I got off work.”
Wayne met her at the door with a fresh bouquet of flowers and took her to breakfast. By the end of the date, Beth said, she had determined to keep him.
“He was [a] perfect gentleman — opened the door, paid for the meal, was thoughtful and just very kind,” Beth said. “I remember very well thinking, ‘I’m holding on to this fellow. There’s no way I’m going to let him go.’”
Wayne wasn’t so sure, primarily because there was an age gap of 25 years. Beth was not concerned; her parents were 33 years apart and had been married for nearly as long.
“It really wasn’t a big deal for me because I grew up with that,” Beth said. “To me, age was nothing but a number.”
As they grew closer together, Beth found more and more to admire about Wayne. At the time, he was living with his mother, taking care of her in her old age. It spoke volumes to her of the care he had for his mother.
“He was always concerned. He said, ‘I’m 48, I live at home with my mom, who’s going to want to go out with me?’” Beth said. “That broke my heart because everybody would just look at him — his physical appearance — and not look at his heart, and I saw his heart. I saw the kindness in his eyes.”
Wayne felt the same way and proposed to Beth the week after Valentine’s Day in 1994. That November, 51 weeks after they first met, Beth and Wayne married.
The couple was very similar. They had many of the same interests — both were active in church, both loved reading and American history, and both loved to travel. Still, there were just as many differences.
“He was very much an introvert. I am such an extrovert,” Beth said. “The idea of just staying at home on a Friday night reading a book drives me absolutely crazy, yet for him, that was a perfectly great way to spend an evening.”
Beth loved sports, and Wayne couldn’t care less. She would get season tickets to the Liberty University women’s basketball games, sitting with the coach’s wife and encouraging the team. He sat at the top of the stadium with a book. When they were invited to kid’s games, he would go — but always with a book. At Super Bowl parties, he would come for the food and fellowship, and as soon as the game started, he’d bring out his book.
“He would come along because he wanted to be with me and he knew that that was something I wanted to do,” Beth said.
One of their biggest loves was shared, however. Both Beth and Wayne loved children, and while they could never have their own, they worked together for decades as local youth leaders, bringing groups into their house most days after church. Each one of those kids was treated as family.
Their other love, of course, was for each other, and everyone knew it. They would race to say “I love you” in the morning when they woke up, at noon, at 6 p.m., and at night before bed. That was their daily practice.
“We counted ourselves blessed because so many times, even now, I hear married people — they’ll call the other on the phone, and it’s rare that you hear them say ‘I love you’ just once,” Beth said. “We were saying it four times a day, every day, for nearly 31 years.”
Their marriage was certainly not perfect, Beth said, but it was good, and from the beginning, they decided that they would stick those hard moments out. Divorce was never an option.
“We took our vows seriously,” Beth said.
Life was going well for the couple. Beth had gone back to school and received her doctorate, and Wayne was enjoying retirement. Then, one day, Wayne felt bad after walking the dog. It seemed he had a stomach bug. Three days later Beth had planned to file paperwork to run for city council, but they decided to put it off a few more days until Wayne’s birthday. Instead, Beth convinced her husband to go to the hospital for fluids. He almost passed out standing up and was taken in an ambulance.
Hours later, Wayne was dead. He’d suffered a heart attack that day, walking the dog, and the long wait before he went to the hospital had damaged his heart. Beth’s decades-long marriage was over in moments.
Still, she has hope. Beth joined a widows’ ministry, and has shared her story on the radio with the hope that it will reach others who are hurting.
“Grief hits each of us in a different way,” Beth said. “It’s never going to be normal, but things that I am going through or have gone through or will go through may help somebody else and may give them hope … There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
