Vancouver couple prove there’s no age limit on romance, happiness

In June 1998, bride-to-be Norma advised her fiance that she’d give him 20 years and then consider renegotiating their contract. She was a few months ahead of schedule when she announced, a week before Valentine’s Day, that Victor has nothing to worry about.

“He’s my sweetie,” said Norma Goetz, 78.

“She’s my cookie,” said Victor Goetz, 89.

A shared passion for books, classical music, museums and theater is one thing that never stops drawing these relocated culture vultures together, they said. Also key is religious faith, even though the details differ for each of them. But devotion to a big, blended family is the main thing.

The shaggy tale of how Victor and Norma met, merged and moved, first to a big home in Seattle and then a compact one in east Vancouver, is a perfect example of how life’s unpredictable and even tragic detours can still lead to happiness and love, Norma Goetz said.

“Life turned left instead of right,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs. And we’ve had a lot of fun.”

Travel and a twist

New Jersey native Victor Goetz started out an Orthodox Jew. Arkansas native Norma Owings, who moved to Portland as a teenager, grew up Catholic. The “religion corner” in their living room features not just artistic crucifixes and Stars of David but also icons from the Greek Orthodox faith, which both embraced for a while, to differing degrees, when they lived near Seattle.

Also on display is a portrait of the Rev. Wayne Forbes, a Portland parish priest who unwittingly helped bring this couple together. The Jewish Victor frankly glows while talking about the late Catholic leader. “He was one of the most amazing men I’ve ever met in my life. And I’ve met a lot of people,” he said.

In 1991, Victor Goetz — an engineer by training and a manager at pharmaceutical giant Warner Lambert for 32 years — was vacationing with his first wife in Eastern Europe, traveling by tour bus, when they met Forbes at a stopover in Prague. (They took him to lunch at a McDonald’s restaurant, and Victor remembers that Forbes was amazed to find beer served there.) A warm friendship formed, and the couple stayed in touch with Forbes, who sent Victor a lovely letter of condolence when his wife died in 1995.

Forbes, who remembered that Victor’s wife was a Catholic who converted to Judaism, wrote that he had said Catholic prayers as well as making a contribution to his local synagogue in her memory.

In the summer of 1997, Goetz visited his daughter and grandchildren in Seattle and then his friend Rev. Forbes in Southwest Portland. He borrowed his daughter’s car to make the Portland run, and at first the plan was for him to leave the car at Forbes’ church, where his daughter and her husband would pick it up at the end of their upcoming Seattle-to-Portland bicycle journey. But instead, Victor’s daughter suggested he leave the car in Vancouver with her best friend, Norma.

Victor assumed that his daughter’s best friend must be around her age, and was amazed to greet “this lovely woman, barefoot, in white shorts, tending her garden,” who was much closer to his own age. The two of them had a definite spark, he said, but they lived on opposite coasts. That’s the kind of relationship Victor calls “geographically undesirable.”

Trauma and recovery

But the couple discovered an amazing coincidence. Norma, Victor and their spouses had all attended the Goetzes’ daughter’s wedding, years earlier, but hadn’t met. Norma and her late husband even became the godparents of Victor’s grandchildren. Norma and Victor, total strangers, were nearly family already.

Norma’s husband had died within months of Victor’s wife in 1995, but not before he helped her heal after a major accident. Norma — who had worked in telecommunications sales — slipped and fell on ice and sustained a serious brain injury. It took her five years to return to something like normal, she said, and she’s still somewhat impaired. Her facility for numbers and directions never returned. She used to play music, too, but that’s all gone now, she said.

“It was like a death,” she said, and her husband was the one who saved her. He used to do things like post signs in their home reminding Norma to “breathe” — otherwise, she said, she’d forget and literally pass out. Then, in his mid-50s, he died unexpectedly of a massive stroke.

“It was incredibly unfair,” Norma said, choking up.

Her priest told her, “You have to keep on living until you’re alive again,” she said. It was advice that made no sense to her until she met Victor two years later. “It was the first time I felt alive again,” she said. “It was the first time I laughed again.”

Victor visited Norma in Vancouver. Norma visited Victor in New Jersey. The couple bought a big home near Seattle and married. “Even though I was 70 at the time, I promised her 20 years,” Victor said. He was glad to leave the East Coast, he added.

Seattle is where they discovered that a Greek Orthodox church in their neighborhood came close to satisfying both of their religious needs. Unlike many other Christian sects, Greek Orthodoxy emphasizes the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, Norma said. She joined formally; Victor said he couldn’t do that, but he certainly embraces the teachings and philosophy of Jesus.

He used to have long theological conversations with Rev. Forbes, he said, who reassured him: “Always remember, Jesus was a Jew until the day he died.”

20 years, 57 birthdays

Norma Goetz’s family is based in the Portland-Vancouver area, so the couple used to drive down here frequently to visit them — and their friend Rev. Forbes. “He became a very special part of our family,” Victor said. When Forbes died in 2010, Victor noted proudly, more than 1,600 people attended his funeral.

Speaking of mobs of people, the couple’s massive list of obligatory birthday phone calls now includes 57 names — all family, they said. “I’m very close to all our family. Jews are very family oriented,” Victor said.

In 2017 the couple downsized from that big home near Seattle — a place full of stairways — to a single-level, double-wide manufactured home at Creekside Estates. “It was the best thing we could do for us,” said Norma. “We cut everything in half.”

Victor suffers from idiopathic (nondiabetic) neuropathy, and can’t feel his feet; he gets around on canes and a walker. Norma still drives, but only during daylight hours. Her sense of direction remains impaired, so the two of them function as a tight team, with Victor navigating and Norma driving.

At home, Norma sews and quilts, cooks sophisticated meals, and lately has been trying her hand at painting, she said. Victor, who’ll be 90 in March, reads The Wall Street Journal, does The New York Times crossword puzzle and admires the antiques he used to collect. He also monitors the stock market (which has been painful lately, he said).

“This guy is going to be 90 years old, can you believe that? I think he’s an amazing man,” Norma said. “He is aware, this is what you have to do to keep it going. How many people do you know who’ve just given up?”