I always believed that sixty-two years of marriage was enough time to know a person completely. That was the illusion I had built my life inside, and I had lived there so long it had stopped feeling like an illusion at all. I knew the way Harold cleared his throat before saying something he considered important. I knew he took his coffee with exactly.
one sugar and that he pretended to like my sister Evelyn’s fruitcake every Christmas for four decades out of pure politeness. I knew the particular sighing sound he made when he was trying not to argue with me, and I knew the way he held my hand differently when he was worried versus when he was simply content. I had mapped the man, or so I believed.
I had catalogued his habits and memorized his silences and I thought there was nothing left in him that could surprise me.
Harold had been sick since February. The doctors were kind about it, the way doctors learn tobe when there is nothing useful left to say. They used words like “progressive” and “irreversible,” which were clinical ways of saying that what was happening inside him could not be stopped, only witnessed. So we witnessed it together. I sat beside his bed every day and held his hand and we talked about everything and nothing, about our sons and our
grandchildren, about the summer we drove through New England thirty years ago and got lost twice and laughed about it both times. We talked until talking tired him, and then I sat in the chair beside him and read while he slept, and I memorized the sound of his breathing because I knew I was going to need to remember it later.
He died on a Tuesday morning
in September, very quietly, the way he had lived. I was holding his hand.
The funeral was on a Thursday in October at St. Catherine’s, the church in our neighborhood where our boys had been baptized and where Harold and I had renewed our vows on our fiftieth anniversary. The morning light came through the stained glass windows in blues and reds and
golds, spreading colors across the wooden pews that seemed almost too beautiful for a day devoted to loss. My sons flanked me throughout the service, Marcus on my left and Steven on my right, their hands steady on my arms, and I was grateful for their bodies beside me because I was not entirely certain I would remain upright without them.
The line ofmourners afterward seemed to go on forever. Harold had been the kind of man people genuinely wanted to be near, the kind who remembered your birthday and showed up when your basement flooded and never said a harsh word about anyone in his hearing. You do not fully understand how many lives a person has touched until you stand in a receiving line at
their funeral and watch those lives file past you one by one, each carrying a story about your husband that you had never heard. I accepted their condolences in a kind of polite numbness. My own voice sounded distant to me, as though it belonged to someone standing slightly behind where I was.
