The Three Boxes On Our Bench

Harry died six years ago. My husband. Forty one years married and then a quiet morning and a sound in the next room and then no more Harry. I will not dress it up. The years after that were gray years. When you lose the person who shared your bed and your work and your worry, you do not just lose him. You lose the person you were when he was looking at you. I got old in a hurry after Harry. I let the garden go. I stopped going to church for a while, which my mother would have been ashamed of, and then I started going back, which I think my mother was glad to see from wherever she watches.

And then Danny died. This past winter. His daughter called me herself to tell me, which was kind of her, a woman I had never met telling a stranger that her father was gone. Heart, she said. Fast. He had been out on the lake ice checking somebody’s fish house and he came in and sat down and that was that. I cried on the phone with a woman I had never met. She said her name was Janine. She said, Mrs. Mueller, my dad talked about you. All of you. The five of you. He talked about the bench right up until the end.

So that was where I stood, come September of this year. Dot gone. Danny gone. Lorraine lost inside her own mind out in Arizona. Walt failing in Oregon with his bad lungs. And me, Ruthie, sixty eight years old and the last one who could still get in a car and drive to a lake.

I almost did not go. I want to be honest about that, because I think the going is the whole point of this and you should know how close I came to not doing it.

My daughter thought it was a foolish idea. She did not say foolish. She is too kind to say foolish. She said, Mom, it is four hours each way, and nobody is going to be there, and you will just sit on a bench by yourself and be sad, and what is the point of that. And I did not have a good answer for her, because she was right about the facts. Nobody was going to be there. Dot was in the ground. Danny was in the ground. Lorraine did not know what year it was. Walt could not fly. I was going to drive four hours to keep a promise to four people, and three of them could not keep it back, and one of them would not even know I had gone.

What is the point of that.

I sat in my kitchen the night before and I prayed about it, which is a thing I have started doing again, and I did not get an answer the way you want one, in words. But I got a feeling, and the feeling was this: you do not keep a promise because the other person is watching. You keep it because you are the kind of person who keeps promises, and if you break this one, you will have broken something in yourself that you cannot fix with being right about the facts.