WESTWOOD, N.J.—The rain stopped just long enough.
On Sept. 26, Rudolph “Rudy” Jaeger gathered with family and friends outside Central Unitarian Church on Bergen Street to mark his 39th wedding anniversary with his late wife, Susan Ulich Jaeger.
For nearly four decades, the couple had renewed their wedding vows every Sept. 26, wherever in the world they happened to be.
Susan died May 5, 2023, but Rudy has kept the tradition alive — in a cathedral in Norway, in Vermont, alone in his Westwood living room and now, with a dozen loved ones looking on, outside the church’s new home.
“It rained like crazy,” Jaeger told Pascack Press at our newsroom last week. “We were all there with umbrellas.”
Then the skies cleared.
“It stopped raining at 4:45. And it started raining at 5:30, and in between there, it was 15 minutes for my ceremony,” he said.
The Rev. Andrée Cornelia Mol officiated, reading from the vows the couple exchanged when they married Sept. 26, 1987, at a Unitarian church in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.
A framed photograph of the couple on their wedding day stood among flowers at the gathering. Susan was absent, but the words were familiar, drawn from text decades old and graced by handwritten edits—each phrase, each word, having earned its place and its promise.
Susan died May 5, 2023, but Rudy has kept the tradition alive — in a cathedral in Norway, in Vermont, alone in his Westwood living room and now, with a dozen loved ones looking on, outside the church’s new home. Courtesy photo.
A life together
Rudy and Susan met through Bell Labs, where she was responsible for a program involving donations of surplus scientific equipment to colleges.
Jaeger, a toxicologist, had served on the faculty of Harvard University’s School of Public Health and worked for Polaroid. He later established a Westwood company specializing in scientific equipment for environmental and pharmaceutical research.
He still works as the company’s chief scientist, although his two daughters, from his first marriage, both local, now run the business. He also has a son.
The couple made their home in Westwood, where Susan’s fondness for front porches became something of a running theme in their lives.
She had grown up in Bound Brook, in a house with a porch where neighborhood children gathered to play on rainy days. She remembered those afternoons fondly and never lost her affection for a welcoming front porch.
As the couple traveled around town, she would sometimes point out a house whose porch caught her eye.
“And so, periodically, I would do something silly, like buy it,” Jaeger recalled.
The couple also traveled widely, but wherever they found themselves on Sept. 26, they made time to return to the promises they had made in Massachusetts.
“We’ve done it in the South Pacific,” Jaeger recalled. “We did it in Vermont, where we had a condo, and, you know, wherever we were, or Westwood.”
The ritual was simple. They would recite the same words that had been spoken at their wedding, renewing their commitment privately, without necessarily gathering an audience or conducting a formal religious service.
For the first 15 years, they also had a standing appointment with the minister who married them, Bob Thayer.
At 5 p.m. on their anniversary, they would telephone him.
“We did it again, Bob,” they would say.
Then they would raise a glass of champagne.
After Thayer died, they continued the tradition without the annual call.
The ceremony traveled with them, becoming a constant through the changing circumstances of their marriage.
Jaeger described it as something larger than an anniversary observance — a thread connecting the experiences of a life shared.
“I mean, it’s a long thread, but it has the focus that you say your vows, you repeat them,” he said.
“You have a lot of interesting times in between, some of which are good and some of which are less good. But the bottom line is that you were together.”
The vows endure
Their marriage lasted nearly 36 years.
Jaeger said Susan suffered a stroke following surgery and spent the final six months of her life in his care.
After her death, he traveled to Norway, where her family had deep roots.
He brought her ashes to an island off the Norwegian coast that her family had owned in the late 1800s. There, he laid her to rest alongside her great-grandparents.
It was a journey of remembrance, but the calendar was approaching a familiar date.
On Sept. 26, Jaeger and Susan’s relatives gathered at the cathedral in Hammerfest, a city in far northern Norway, to repeat the wedding ceremony.
One of her cousins played the flute. Halfway through the observance, the music turned to the theme from the 1970 film “Love Story.”
The words Rudy and Susan had first spoken in Massachusetts were heard again, this time among her relatives, in the country of her ancestors.
The following year, Jaeger observed their anniversary in Vermont.
In 2025, he recited the vows in his Westwood living room.
“I didn’t have anybody to do it with at the time,” he said.
Still, he continued.
A congregation returns
After Susan’s death, Jaeger had begun looking for ways to remain engaged with the community.
He attended municipal meetings, including sessions of the zoning board, and took a renewed interest in local affairs.
At one of those meetings, he made an unexpected discovery: Central Unitarian Church, a congregation he had belonged to decades earlier in Paramus, was moving to Westwood.
The church had begun in Hackensack in 1898 and moved to Paramus around 1925. Generations of congregants worshipped at its former home on Forest Avenue.
As membership declined and the building aged, the congregation decided to sell the property and seek a new home.
It purchased the former PNC Bank building at 36 Bergen St. in downtown Westwood, undertaking a substantial renovation to transform the commercial property into a place of worship.
For Jaeger, the move brought an old connection back into his life.
He renewed his involvement with the congregation and became a trustee, taking on an active role as a liaison between the church, contractors and borough officials during the renovation.
The project has proved more difficult and expensive than anticipated, he said.
The congregation, which he estimated at approximately 120 members, has been holding services at the Woman’s Club of Westwood and using space at a Methodist church for religious education while awaiting completion of the work.
Jaeger said the church also faces a financial challenge because the former commercial property remains on the tax rolls while it awaits approval for occupancy and recognition of its religious use.
The congregation has applied for property tax-exempt status. Jaeger hopes that holding a religious service at the site before Oct. 1 will help establish its eligibility.
The Sept. 26 gathering, he said, was the first religious service held at the church’s new Westwood property.
The timing was significant for the congregation. But it was also the Jaegers’ anniversary, and Rudy had a promise to keep.
A ceremony in the rain
The church building was not yet available for the gathering, so the ceremony took place outside.
Family and friends assembled along Bergen Street, with a framed wedding photograph, flowers and an urn arranged in remembrance of Susan.
The weather was hardly ideal.
Rain fell heavily before the service, sending guests beneath umbrellas. Then, shortly before the ceremony, it stopped.
The Rev. Mol officiated, using the wedding text that Rudy and Susan had carried through their marriage.
The document includes traditional affirmations of love and commitment, along with a reading from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, a meditation on the changing nature of relationships.
Lindbergh writes of love not as something fixed and unchanging, but as something that must accommodate the ebb and flow of life — the changing tides of intimacy, independence and companionship.
The wedding text also contains a blessing that seems especially apt for a couple who found such pleasure in a shared home, a welcoming porch and the shelter of each other’s company:
“Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other.”
The words take on a different resonance after nearly four decades, particularly when one partner is no longer there to speak them.
Yet Jaeger has continued to return to the ceremony, year after year, carrying forward the vows they made each other.
The rain held off long enough for the service.
Then the group walked to nearby Five Dimes Brewery, where the dozen or so participants broke bread (pizza from neighboring Pompilio’s, and beer).
Asked whether Susan would have been pleased with this year’s observance, Jaeger didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “We did it the same way we did it each year.”