Emily Paine Carter

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Although we wouldn't turn away any romantic tokens, any "lover-ly" delights from our valentines -- especially the chocolate -- look for the true heart.

Gary Carter has such a heart. His story is one of pain and loss -- and grace.

Although Gary, 56, lives in Alexandria, I proudly claim him as Salem's own. It's not for the usual hometown-boy-makes-good story -- although, as the longtime curator for National Geographic Television and Digital Media, he qualifies.

Quiet and studious, at Andrew Lewis High School he used his wide-ranging wit and intelligence in co-editing the 1968 yearbook. Somehow he avoided the typical adolescent obsession with self.

Even early on, good and kind Gary was the rare 17-year-old who subbed for the Tabernacle Baptist Church organist.

In e-mails he told of meeting beautiful, cheerful Cathy (then Witeck) when they were College of William and Mary freshman biology lab partners in 1968. That same year they both wound up at Bruton Parish Church; they found the Episcopal church to be a Protestant/Catholic compromise, and a faith in which they remained "at home" from then on, he said.

The English majors shared a love for British novelist Jane Austen and later named their daughters Emma and Elizabeth after Austen characters.

The two did experience a tragedy just weeks before they were married in William and Mary's Wren chapel. Gary's younger brother Rick was to be best man, but he was killed when a friend's gun accidentally went off.

Cathy had a successful career and also devoted herself to charitable works. She helped young people in her family's church and in the Alexandria City Public Schools gain more educational and career opportunities; her outstanding contributions earned her a 1997 Salute to Women Award.

A few months ago, Cathy lost her brave struggle with cancer. Gary, Emma, 26, and Liz, 23, had cared for her around the clock when she became incapacitated.

Cathy's obituary noted that her "cheerfulness, her hope and her affirmation of the good in everyone she met were a daily inspiration to all who knew her."

Gary dearly misses his beloved. He said he tries to busy himself with "church stuff" and that he "keeps sane" by running 10 miles each morning -- even when he returns to Salem every month to visit his mother, Mary Shaw Carter, an Alzheimer's patient at Richfield Retirement Community. (His dad, Lawson Wayne Carter, died in 1996 of a rare heart disease.)

Gary wrote of gratitude toward those trying to lift up his anguish. He spoke of a heart whose heaviness he cannot yet fully describe. Yet he tried to explain what was lost with Cathy's death: Counting on another human being. That sweetheart's ability to complete your thoughts and sentences. Having the same memories of Indian bedspreads hanging from dorm-room ceilings. "But also the essential stuff like her being strong where you're weak, her having words different from yours to speak to your children in difficult times and in joyful times, and her being large of heart and spirit where, well, maybe you're not.

"And as great a blessing as it was to share her life, I was unprepared for the pure gift it was to be able to share her death. Of course, living with the ... indescribable absence is another matter entirely. Ask me about this again, I guess in another twenty years, and I just may be able to begin talking about the pain and the waking up every morning and feeling that NOTHING fits exactly right any more anywhere, that everything is just slightly askew, and that it will ALWAYS be askew until you get to heaven ... 'where we shall meet and never part,' to be one again, as we are promised, as part of that larger Oneness the hope for which yanks us (well, at least me) out of bed each day."

For such devotion, I could forgo a lifetime of chocolate.