I don’t know if someday will come. I don’t know if I will ever be ready. But I didn’t close the door completely, and neither did she, and maybe that is its own kind of truth.
—
The shoe box is still in the attic. I went up there last week to get the Christmas decorations, and I saw the corner of my mother’s suitcase pushed into the shadows. I did not open it. I did not touch it. I stood there for a moment with a string of lights in my hands, looking at that suitcase, and then I turned around and went back downstairs.
That is what moving on looks like, I think. Not forgetting. Not forgiving. Not resolving. Just choosing, over and over again, not to let the thing you cannot change be the thing that stops you from living.
I still have Tuesday dinners alone now. Or not alone, exactly. Renee comes over some weeks. Sometimes I go to her house and she cooks, which is a mixed blessing because Renee is a terrible cook but a wonderful host, and I love her too much to tell her that her chicken is dry.
Marcus comes up from Houston twice a year with the kids. We go to the aquarium. We go to the park. We sit in my backyard and I watch his children run through the grass and I think about how life keeps going even when you don’t feel ready for it to keep going.
Gloria and I still talk on the phone every week or so. Shorter calls than before. Less revealing. But she is still in my life, and I am still in hers, and maybe that is more complicated than a clean break would have been, but I have never been someone who does things the easy way.
If you’ve ever found out something about someone you loved that changed everything you thought you knew, I’d like to hear from you. Not because there’s a right answer. There isn’t one. But because some things are easier to carry when you know you’re not carrying them alone.
I am seventy-one years old. I have forty-three years of marriage behind me and however many years ahead of me that God sees fit to give me. I have a shoe box in the attic and a best friend who loved my husband and a story I have never told anyone until now.
And I am still here.
That is not nothing. That is the whole thing, actually. Being still here. Waking up and making coffee and sitting at the window and deciding, every single day, what to carry and what to set down.
The letters stay in the attic for now. The questions stay unanswered. The grief stays where it is, smaller than it used to be, quieter, but still present in the way that things that mattered always are.
And me? I am learning to be okay with that.
Not perfect. Not healed in the way people mean when they use that word. Just here. Just still here.
That part I’ll take.
Part Two: The Things She Never Said
Six months after I found the letters, I started dreaming about the third row.
Not every night. Just often enough that I began to dread falling asleep. In the dream, I was always standing at the front of the church, facing the congregation, and everyone’s faces were blurred except Gloria’s.
She was in the third row, and she was crying, and I was trying to reach her, but the rows between us kept multiplying. One row became ten. Ten became fifty. By the time I got to where she had been sitting, she was gone, and the only thing left was a single white handkerchief on the pew, damp with tears.
I would wake up with my heart pounding and lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle around me.
The dreams stopped after a while, but the questions didn’t.
—
Here is what I have never told anyone about the weeks after Raymond died.
In the third week, I went through his phone. Not because I was looking for anything. Because the phone company had called to ask about canceling the line, and I needed to see if there was anything on it I wanted to keep. Photos. Messages. The ordinary debris of a life.
I sat on the couch with his phone in my hands. It was still charged. He had been using it until the week before he died, texting Renee about the grandkids, checking the weather, playing some word game he had been addicted to for years.
I opened his messages first. They were what I expected. Renee. Marcus. A few old colleagues. A group chat with the men from his bowling league, which had been inactive for months because everyone knew he was sick and no one knew what to say.
No messages from Gloria.
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