She Found A Shoebox In His Closet Labeled With Years She Hadn't Lived Yet

 

I'd put off cleaning out his closet for eleven months, and I told myself it was because I was busy, though the truth was simpler than that.

Richard had been gone almost a year when I finally opened the sliding door and started with his shoes, the easiest things to let go of, worn leather that still held the shape of his feet. It was behind the shoe boxes, pushed against the back wall, that I found the shoebox that wasn't shoes at all.

Inside were envelopes, maybe thirty of them, each one labeled in his handwriting: Year One. Year Two. Year Five. Year Ten. Some years skipped, others doubled up, all the way to Year Thirty.

I sat down on the closet floor with the box in my lap for a long time before I opened the first one.

Year One, he'd started. If you're reading this, it means I was right, and I went first, the way I always told you I would, being older and worse about my cholesterol than I ever let on. I imagine you're angry at me for that. You should be. I'm sorry for every steak I ate against doctor's orders.

I want you to know something. The hardest year won't be this one. Everyone will tell you the first year is the hardest, and it will be terrible, but you'll have so much to do — decisions, paperwork, people checking on you constantly. The second year is the one nobody warns you about, when everyone assumes you're fine and stops calling as often. I wanted you to have something waiting for you when that happens, so you'd know I thought about it. I thought about all of it.

I read four letters that first night and had to stop. Not because they were sad exactly — Richard's letters weren't maudlin, they were oddly practical, full of instructions about the water heater and reminders to get the car serviced and, in Year Three, an entire page about how I should absolutely go on the trip to Portugal we'd always talked about, "even if it feels strange to go without me. Especially if it feels strange. Go anyway."

But there was a particular ache in reading a man's voice addressing years he knew he wouldn't see, a kind of love that had planned for its own absence with more care than most people plan for their presence.

I found out later, from his sister Colleen, that he'd started writing them the year he was first diagnosed with the heart condition, eight years before he actually died. "He didn't want you scared every day," she told me. "He decided instead to just quietly prepare, in his own way, for whatever came."

I hadn't known that. In eight years of living with a man who knew, more than I did, how limited his time might be, I never once saw him treat it like a countdown. He coached our grandson's baseball team. He complained about the neighbor's leaf blower. He was, in every visible way, a man with all the time in the world, and I understood now that this had been a choice, not an accident — he'd put the fear into these letters instead of into our daily life, so that our daily life could stay ordinary for as long as possible.

Year Seven made me put the box down entirely for a week. In it, he wrote about our son David, who we'd lost touch with for two years after a fight over money that neither of them ever properly apologized for.

By now, if things went the way they usually do, you and David still haven't fully patched things up. I know you've been waiting for him to reach out first, the way you always do, because you think reaching out first makes you look like you were more wrong. You weren't more wrong. You were just more stubborn about waiting. Call him. Today, whatever today is when you read this. Don't wait for Year Eight.

I called David that same afternoon. We hadn't spoken in over a year at that point, the space between us having widened out of nothing but habit and pride, exactly as Richard predicted. David cried on the phone — actual, unhidden crying, the kind he hadn't done in front of me since he was a boy — and said he'd been waiting for an excuse to call for months and hadn't found one.

"Dad would've hated how long we let this go on," he said.

"He wrote a letter about it," I told him. "Eight years ago."

The silence on the line after that told me everything about how much that meant to him.

I've read through Year Fifteen now, out of the thirty he wrote, doling them out to myself slowly instead of all at once, the way you'd ration something precious you weren't sure you could replace. Some of them are practical. Some are funny — Year Twelve is almost entirely about how I should not, under any circumstances, let our daughter talk me into getting a dog, "because you will fall in love with it in four days and then be devastated all over again in twelve years, and I've already used up my allotment of watching you grieve something you loved."

I went to Portugal in Year Three, exactly as instructed. I stood on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic and read that letter again, out loud, to no one, because it felt wrong to read it silently in a place he'd told me to go.

I used to think the hardest part of losing him would be the absence of his voice. I understand now that he'd found a way to leave twenty-nine more years of it behind, doled out one envelope at a time, so that even his silence would come with instructions for how to bear it.

I have fifteen letters left. I'm in no hurry to read them. For the first time since he died, waiting doesn't feel like loss. It feels like something to look forward to.