I opened it with shaking hands, and there in my Marge handwriting, the same hand that signed forty years of anniversary cards, was a letter she had written when she still looked healthy, before I even knew how sick she was.
She knew. That was the first thing that undid me. She had known she was leaving me long before she let it show, and instead of spending those months afraid, she had spent them getting things ready, so that I would not be alone in the after. Settled, she had been. Now I knew why.
The letter was not sad, or not only sad. It was Marge, plain and warm and a little bossy, the way she always was. She told me she loved me, forty years worth, and that she was sorry to go first, and that she had thought long and hard about the man she was leaving behind and what he would need.
And then she gave me my orders, because that was her way. She told me not to sit home alone in that quiet house. She told me to keep coming to our diner every Sunday, to our booth by the window, and to order the short stack for her and the eggs for me, and to let Rosa keep the coffee coming, because life does not stop needing to be lived just because it gets lonesome.
She had arranged it, too. She had left money with Rosa, enough to cover my Sunday breakfast for a long, long time, so I would have a reason to get up and get down there every week. And she had left more envelopes, one for my birthday, one for our anniversary, one for Christmas, each to be handed to me at the right time, so she could keep talking to me across the years even after she was gone.
My wife had planned her own goodbye like she planned everything, with love and a list, and never let one bit of the worry show while she sat across from me holding my hand.
I go every Sunday now. I sit in our booth by the window, and I order for both of us, and Rosa keeps the coffee coming with eyes that still go wet, and I do not feel quite so alone, because Marge made sure I would not.
She spent her last healthy months making certain that losing her would not mean losing everything. The grief is still there, and it always will be, but she wrapped it in a plan and a booth and a stack of letters, so that every Sunday I get a little more of her, doled out by the woman who loved me enough to keep loving me from the other side of goodbye. That was my Marge. Always the strong one. Always thinking of me.