My Wife Of 26 Years Died. 6 Months Later, I Received A Call That Left Me Stunned.

She struggled through one more month. The morning when her pain finally ended, I’d bathed her and even put on a perfume that she liked. After days of incoherence, she startled me by suddenly observing, “That’s not deodorant I smell!”

“You’re right, that’s the Vera Wang I got you for Christmas,” I told her.

“That was a winner!” she cried happily. Those were her last words to me.

Later that day, my last words to her were to tell her that she was the finest person I’d ever met.

That afternoon, I sat at the memorial bench Rebecca had picked out with our two daughters on either side of me. We briefly held hands and closed our eyes. It was a discordantly beautiful October afternoon. The bench was beside a briskly bubbling creek with stepping stones to cross above a manufactured rapid. Just then, a mom, dad, and two young girls came tiptoeing over the creek, as the four of us had done when our girls were little. We sat silently for a few more minutes, each lost in our thoughts and searing memories. The sun glowed through the fall leaves above the peaceful creek setting. Rebecca had picked the perfect spot for just this moment and many more in the future.

Condolences came in from people all over the world: old colleagues in Rome, Ecuador, and Tanzania; friends from four continents; an elderly couple she’d recently met at a fire; lives she’d touched. We pulled off the complex memorial service, which Rebecca had planned in considerable detail. The service turned out well, but then the crowd was gone, and I was back to sleeping in the same bed, in the exact spot where she’d struggled — and where she’d at last found peace.

The bright sunny days of October turned into the gloomy gray skies of November in Wisconsin. I was in our house alone, surrounded by Rebecca’s things and all of my memories. There were stacks of medical supplies, suddenly both conspicuous and useless; there was that tragically powerful hairbrush.  

I learned a lot about grief. It was easier to deal with her things — to store or throw them away — in the mornings when I was fresh, and I learned that things, however charged, were just things. I tried to schedule evenings to cry so that I would do it less at work, and I managed this with mixed results. The tears seemed to come from some inexhaustible spring.