The Envelopes
The day I buried my husband, my children left me alone at the airport.
I had not slept in three days. I had watched Henry lowered into the earth of the Swiss village where he was born, in the churchyard where his family had been going for two centuries, under a sky that had not been able to choose between rain and clearing and had settled on both simultaneously, the way Swiss weather does in autumn when the mountains are too close to allow the sky much room to decide. I had shaken hands with people whose names I would not remember and accepted condolences in German and French and English and held myself together through all of it with the specific deliberate rigidity of someone who knows that what they are feeling is too large to feel right now, and that later is a real place, and that they need to reach it first.
The flight home was nine hours. I stared at the window for most of them. The woman beside me offered me her blanket and I thanked her and did not take it. I watched the dark ocean move beneath the clouds and thought about Henry’s hands and how he had kept them folded when he prayed, which was a thing he did privately and without announcement, the way he did everything.
I called Jason from the terminal before I had even located the baggage claim. His number was at the top of my recent calls because I had tried him from Switzerland when Henry died, and then again the morning of the funeral, and both times he had answered and said he was sorry and then the conversation had ended before I was ready for it to end.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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