Published: October 10, 2008 01:41 pm            

'I was madly in love' | Couple rekindle their romance after 28 years

BY RUTH RICE

RRICE@TRIBDEM.COM

The story of the reunion between Linda Diehl and Tom DeLia after a 28-year separation reads like a romance novel.

Linda was born in Somerset and still has family in the area.

She graduated from Somerset Senior High School in 1962 and Penn State in 1966.

Tom grew up in Chester County and attended St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia before enlisting in the Army in 1968.

The setting for their romantic reunion was Old World Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. The date was Nov. 11, 2001.

Tom had flown in from Boulder, Colo. Linda had taken a train from Baltimore.

“You go up to the room first, then I’ll call from the lobby,” Tom told the woman he had fallen in love with 28 years before.

Linda complied, remembering the moment she came down the hotel stairs.

“He was just standing there,” she said. “I can’t put it into words. It was electric. I was shaking.”

Tom walked toward her and took her hands, looking at her face for a moment before speaking.

“Let me drink you in,” he said.

Then they kissed for the first time in 28 years, and the sparks were still flying.

Too shaken up to move, Linda and Tom sat down in the lobby to talk, filling in the 28 years they had missed.

One of the first questions was, “When are we getting married?”

The couple had been writing, e-mailing and calling each other since 2001, and they weren’t about to waste any more time.

“We saw no point in waiting,” said Linda, now Linda DeLia. “For Tom, this was his busiest time of year in the wine business. We decided it should be after the new year. We got married Jan. 3, 2002, in Boulder.”

Their story is told in “28 Years Between Kisses: The Love Letters That Reclaimed a Lost Romance,” published in 2006 by Ferinds Vale Press in Denver.

The book is a collection of correspondents the two exchanged after Tom found Linda on the Internet and contacted her in August 2001.

Linda received the letter it had taken Tom three months to write on a sultry Baltimore day. She was in her office at American Express Tax and Business Services at the time.

When she opened the package with an envelope inside marked “T. DeLia” as a return address, Linda had a literal heart-stopping, breathtaking moment.

“I ripped it open and read five single-spaced pages of the most amazing love letter I had ever seen,” Linda said.

“I thought it was the most incredible gift and that I was the luckiest woman on the face of the earth.”

In her first letter to Tom, Linda wrote of how much in love they were 28 years ago and how she remembered everything about him, but she didn’t want to make assumptions.

“I didn’t know what he had in mind,” Linda said. “I was afraid if he saw my picture, he would change his mind. If he saw me, he would see I needed to lose weight.”

Linda feared that her long-lost love would remember her as she was at 27, the last time they had seen each other.

“I wasn’t young, I wasn’t thin,” she said. “I was 57. It was a scary thing. I was cautious.”

After photos were exchanged, it was full speed ahead, and the couple switched to e-mails, sometimes contacting each other two or three times a day.

Linda thought Tom was equally as “gaga” as he had been in his 20s, and apparently Tom thought the same of her.

“I was madly in love,” Linda said. “He was more than I could imagine. I knew we had to meet again.”

One obstacle the couple had to overcome if they planned for a lasting relationship was Linda’s non-Hodgins lymphoma, which was diagnosed in 2000.

“I told him it can be messy,” Linda said. “He said he didn’t care, that he would care for me.”

Linda’s type of cancer is slow growing, and her doctor told her it could be treated right away, or they could watch and wait.

With her platelet count dropping, Linda knew chemotherapy was coming.

“Before the year was over, it was knocked back with chemo,” she said.

Her diagnosis was the reason she originally put the book together.

“When you have cancer, you never know what will happen,” Linda said.

“We had both saved all our e-mails, and I thought I should put them all together so Tom would have evidence of our love in his hands if something happened to me.

“It was my gift to him.”

Tom and Linda edited the book during 2006, before Linda started chemo.

“28 Years Between Kisses” was launched through a print-on-demand publisher on Nov. 11, 2006, the five-year anniversary of their reunion kiss.

“The book launch was for friends in Boulder,” Linda said. “When we went to the courthouse to get married, we had no reception. We thought ‘Let’s throw a party, introduce the book and have a wedding cake.’ We gave the books away to our friends.”

She explained that with a print-on-demand publisher, books are ordered, printed and shipped one at a time as needed.

They have sold 350 copies of their 494-page true story.

“There are a lot of women cancer survivors out there, and I don’t want them to think that life is over,” Linda said.

“You can take your chances with the right man. I want middle-aged women to know that there are men who can really love you and not care what you look like. They see past your face and see inside you.”

During their 28-year separation, Tom never married or had a serious relationship.

“They weren’t you,” he told her later.

Linda and Tom met in 1972, when she was a second-year teaching assistant and he was a returning veteran taking her freshman English class at West Chester University near Philadelphia.

Linda the teacher was drawn to Tom’s stunning first composition on the self-chosen topic, “Can one be a conscientious objector and still be a patriot?”

“I thought, ‘This guy can write,’ ” she said. “He always sat in front. I was intrigued with his mind, his complexity of thought.”

By midsemester, they were in love and having an affair even though Linda was married.

In June 1973, Linda told Tom she had to respect her marriage vows, and he fled brokenhearted to the West.

He later moved to Denver, where a sister lived, and sold wine and conducted wine tours of Italy.

Linda confessed her affair to her husband, who was willing to make the marriage work.

They had a son, Ethan, who now lives in Houston, before divorcing in 1979.

Linda remarried, and divorced again before Tom found her.

The DeLias plan to move to a retirement home they have purchased in Hooversville in 2010.

“We were back the summer of 2002 for a family reunion, and Tom fell in love with Somerset County,” Linda said.

“All my life I said I’d never move back to Somerset. I was a woman of the world.”

Their retirement home is the same house where Linda’s father, Lynn Diehl, and his siblings lived during the Depression.

“I’m really coming home,” Linda said.



In print

Title: “28 Years Between Kisses: The Love Letters That Reclaimed a Lost Romance.”

Authors: Tom and Linda DeLia.

Pages: 494.

Publisher: Ferinds Vale Press LLC, Denver.

Available at: www.amazon.com or www.barnes-andnoble.com.

Price: $18.95.

        

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