PART 1
I am eighty-six years old, and I only learned how to use this recently, because I needed somewhere to put it and I have run out of people my own age.
My granddaughter set it up for me on a Sunday.
It took her about four minutes and she did not ask what I wanted it for, which I was grateful for and which I have since decided she did on purpose.
I have typed this out over eleven days with two fingers.
My name is Thaddeus.
A few days ago my wife Maribeth passed away. She was eighty-four.
For sixty years I believed she was my wife in every sense of the word.
And those sixty years were good years.
I want that said at the very top, before anything else, because of where the rest of this goes and because I do not want one word of what follows read as a complaint about my marriage.
They were good years. All sixty of them. There were four bad ones in the middle, around 1979, and even those were ours.
I loved that woman more than I ever worked out how to say.
I first noticed her at college, in a corridor outside a lecture room, in the October of 1963.
She was carrying too many books and she dropped none of them, which is the detail I have kept for sixty-two years.
The moment I saw her, something in me simply knew I wanted her in my life. I have never been able to improve on that sentence in sixty years of trying.
It took me nearly a year to talk her into giving me a chance.
She has told that story at about four hundred dinners over sixty years, and the number of weeks it took goes up every single time she tells it.
By the end it was eleven months and a petition. There was no petition.
Then I joined the Army, in the January, for reasons that made sense at twenty-five and that I could not defend now.
PART 2
When I found out I was going to Vietnam, I told her I could not imagine leaving without marrying her first.
I was twenty-six years old.
I was not brave about it. I was frightened — properly frightened, in the way you are at twenty-six when something has a date attached to it.
I wanted one true thing to hold on to over there. And I said all of that very badly, in a car, outside her mother’s house, at about eleven at night.
She said yes. Immediately, in a parked car, in the dark. Before I had finished the sentence, which she never let me forget.
So we got married, eleven days later, because that was what we had.
Even now I can picture exactly what she wore.
A simple white summer dress covered in tiny pale-blue flowers.
She made it herself. On a borrowed machine, over about four evenings, out of material from a shop on the corner of a street that is now a bank.
It is in a box in the spare room. I have not opened the box and I am not going to this year.
We had no money, so afterwards we celebrated at a little roadside diner about eleven miles out of town.
She had the chicken. She always had the chicken; it is on the menu of my entire life.
I had something I cannot remember to this day, and she teased me about not remembering it for four decades, every time we drove past that road.
There was nothing grand about any of it.
Four people, a borrowed car, a dress made on a kitchen table, and a diner with vinyl seats eleven miles out of town.
And I do not remember ever being happier. Not before and not since, and I have had sixty good years to be happier in.
A few days later I left.
We wrote to each other whenever we could.
I counted the days between her letters. The worst gap was nineteen days and I can still feel the shape of it in my chest sixty years later.
She wrote about ordinary things. The weather, a neighbour, a job she had taken in an office. Four pages at a time, in that handwriting.
She never once wrote anything heavy in a year of letters.
Not one line about being frightened, or lonely, or about what she was waiting through.
I understood that at the time as her being cheerful for me, and I was proud of her for it, and I told other men in that unit that my wife was a cheerful writer.
I understand it rather differently this week.
About a year after that I came home to her for good.
She was at the gate. She was wearing something blue and she had cut her hair and I did not recognise her for about half a second, which I have never told anybody until now.
That is one of the best days of my life and there is no competition for second place.
From there we built everything.
Three children — two boys and a girl, between 1968 and 1974.
Later, five grandchildren. She spoiled every single one of them in a way I was never once permitted to raise at a table.
A house we paid off in 1994, with a party in the garden and a mortgage certificate she framed herself.
Four cars over the years, all of them hers in practice. One dog, badly behaved, for eleven years.
That is a life. I would not swap one week of it.
This year we marked sixty years.
There was a cake. There were about forty people in our front room and the back door was open because of the heat. My eldest made a speech that went on too long and she held my hand under the table through all of it.
Not long after that, she passed quietly, at about four in the morning, while I sat beside her holding her hand.
There was nothing dramatic about it. Her breathing changed and then it stopped, and a nurse came in, and that was the whole of it.
I stayed with her until the end.
Eleven days in that room. I would like anybody reading this to know that she was not on her own for one minute of it, because it is the only thing in the whole of this account that I did right.
PART 3
The days after the funeral barely felt real.
The house was suddenly enormous.
Every room was too quiet in a way I had not known was possible in a house I have lived in since 1971.
Every small habit reminded me. Her cup, which I have not moved. Her chair. The particular way the back door needs lifting, which she did automatically and which I still do wrong.
Then one afternoon somebody knocked on the front door.
I had been sitting in the kitchen for about four hours doing nothing at all.
Not reading. Not with the radio on. Sitting at a table in a chair that is not my chair, which is the one I had been sitting in for four days without working out why.
A man I had never seen before was standing there.
About fifty. In a suit that was slightly too warm for the day, with a document case under his arm, on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of October.
He had clearly been standing there for a few seconds before he knocked.
My first thought was that somebody had sent somebody about the insurance.
He introduced himself as Maribeth’s attorney.
That confused me straight away.
As far as I knew, Maribeth did not have a lawyer. We had used one twice in sixty years, both times about the house, and he died in 2011 and we went to his funeral.
My wife did not have her own anything. That is what I would have told you on that doorstep with complete confidence.
Then he took out an envelope.
He said: sir, I’m sorry, but she left very specific instructions that I was to give you this only after she passed.
Very specific instructions. That phrase went through me before anything else did.
My wife had given somebody instructions about me. In writing. To be followed after her death.
I stared at him.
My hands had already started going before he said anything else, which they do now and which I have stopped apologising for.
I said: what is this about? Why would my wife hire you?
He hesitated.
He actually looked down at his shoes for about a second, which I noticed at the time and did not understand at all.
I understand it now. He had been told what to say and he had practised it in a car, and the practising had not helped.
And then he said the thing I still wish I had never heard.
He said: your wife?
And he looked straight at me, and I watched him understand, about half a second too late, that I did not know.
There were about twenty people across the road at a neighbour’s gathering — a birthday, with a table out on the lawn — and every one of them turned, because he did not lower his voice and because he had not expected to need to.
And he got hold of my wrist — because I had gone at the knees and he saw it coming from about a foot away — and he said:
Sir. You and Maribeth were never legally married.
Nobody moved.
Somebody across the road put a glass down on a table and I heard it, which tells you exactly how quiet that street had gone in about two seconds.
Four of those people have known us since 1978. One of them was at that sixtieth birthday with a cake in her hands.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said: you need to sit down.
I could not answer him. I had nothing at all. A man of eighty-six standing in his own doorway with his mouth open.
Sixty years.
Three children. Five grandchildren. Two house moves, one war, four jobs between us, a dog.
A whole life. All of it. Every ordinary day of it.
And a stranger standing on my step saying the woman I had called my wife for six decades had never legally been my wife at all.
I took the envelope out of his hand.
My name was on the front in her handwriting. Just my name, nothing else, in the hand I have been reading since 1963.
And that somehow made it worse than anything that man had said to me, because it meant she had sat somewhere and written it.
I opened it there in the doorway and I started reading.
I did not sit down. He asked me to twice and I did not.
Four pages, both sides, in that handwriting, written in — he told me later — the February, which means she carried it finished in a drawer for eight months.
And that man stood on my step for forty minutes while I read it, in the cold, without once suggesting that he should go or that we might do this another time.
PART 4
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