Owners Decide When to Go
My wife died on a Tuesday in February, which I still remember because Tuesday was the day we drove to the farmers market in Almonte together. Thirty-one years of Tuesdays can settle into a marriage so quietly that you do not notice they have become the frame holding your life together until one of you is gone and the frame is standing there, empty, still holding the shape of what was inside it. After Marguerite died, I continued driving to Almonte sometimes.
Not always to buy anything. Some mornings I parked near the edge of the lot where the gravel gave way to winter-brown grass, and I sat with a cooling coffee and watched people carry canvas bags of apples and jars of honey and bunches of flowers wrapped in brown paper. I listened to the low current of ordinary life moving around me and let myself be somewhere we had been together.
I never told people about those mornings. When you do, they tilt their heads and suggest groups, hobbies, trips, anything that makes grief look more manageable from the outside. Grief does not follow a schedule.
I was sixty-three years old, and I had learned by then to let myself feel what I felt without standing at a distance from it and calling that progress. My son’s name is Spencer. He was twenty-nine when all of this started.
He had Marguerite’s eyes, that clear, waiting look she gave people when she wanted the truth and was prepared to wait a long time for it. He grew up watching me work long shifts as an electrician for the city of Ottawa and watching his mother stretch a grocery budget across three people while still making every birthday feel like an event worth having. We were not poor.
We were careful. There is a difference. Poor is when there is not enough.
Careful is when you understand how quickly enough can disappear if you stop paying attention to it. When Marguerite got sick, the cancer moved faster than anyone expected. Spencer was twenty-six.
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