“I think I’ll find me a younger woman.”

Never…ever…say this to your wife.

Age probably didn’t mean much to James and Sara when she was 20 and he was 19. It was a different time and a few months is a short bridge for a trip from fancy to passion.

It was the middle of World War II. 1943 to be exact. They wed. They had children. They watched that war pass, then two major military conflicts, then a short war, and then a so-called war on terror. It was around that time that they began a war of their own. The battle ground was a low-rent neighborhood surrounded by pimps, hookers, drug slingers, and other ne’er-do-wells.

It was on an evening that following May that Sara decided she was hungry…or so she said. She sent her grown daughter to the store for some food. It was around seven o’clock.

Unless you are a 78-year-old woman with a 77 year-old husband, it may be hard to understand what happened next. She had been through a lot, after all. Two strokes, a couple of heart attacks, and a laundry list of old woman maladies that defy a young man’s comprehension.

Where it had not in 1943, age was starting to matter in about a dozen different ways. And husband James picked the wrong time to start pointing that out.

They sat alone in that house on a perfectly fine spring evening and James said the wrong damned thing. The exact wording is matter of discussion right now, but it went a little something like this:

“You’re getting too old for me. I think I’ll find me a younger woman.”

On a television sitcom the wife probably would’ve responded with a joke about Viagra. Sara responded with the home’s pistol. Two shots. One in James’ head. One in his neck. Fifty-eight years of marriage bled out on the floor of their house.

If you believe the talk around the crime scene, 78 year-old Sara (who when wheeled in a wheelchair from the Sheriff’s Office to a waiting car looked more timid than your grandmother ever did) actually used the following phrase when telling her daughter what she had just done:

“You’re dad was talking shit, so I shot him.”

You cannot listen to the story without asking a couple of gnawing questions. The answers are fairly unsatisfactory. Apart from her physical ailments, her family reports that she has no metal problems. And one report suggests James threatened to hit Sara at one point during the evening.

Tonight, 77-year-old James is in a county morgue. Seventy-eight year-old Sara is at home (she’s too old and sick to sit in a jail cell).

Sometimes frustration is a creature that takes almost six decades to mature and takes either a gun or a younger woman to slay.

A reminder… Never–ever–say that to your wife.