Outside, ordinary life was still happening.
Cars moved through the parking lot.
Someone pushed a wheelchair toward the entrance.
A man walked past me carrying a paper coffee cup.
Everything looked offensively normal.
My husband had just died, and the world had apparently decided to continue.
I sat in the passenger seat of our car for nearly twenty minutes before I could even put on the seat belt.
The envelope stayed in my lap.
I kept touching Mark’s handwriting with my thumb.
Open it.
I couldn’t.
Open it.
I still couldn’t.
Eventually I drove home with the envelope beside me, untouched.
When I walked through our front door, Mark’s jacket was hanging where he had left it.
That nearly finished me.
For weeks I had known this day was coming, but knowing death is approaching and living inside the first evening after it arrives are two completely different things.
