Not Entirely Alone

My granddaughter has been encouraging me for some time to set this down, and I have resisted, uncertain whether an old woman's memory holds any interest for a stranger, but she has persuaded me to try. My husband Walter died quite suddenly of his heart, three weeks before what I am about to describe. He was a man of few words and even fewer outward sentiments, the product of his generation, and ours was a marriage built on steady devotion rather than declared affection, though I never once doubted what lay beneath his quiet. His death left a particular shape of silence in our home that I had not anticipated. Not merely an absence of sound. An absence of him specifically. Three weeks after he passed, I was seated in my parlor one late afternoon, mending nothing more significant than a torn hem, when I became aware that I was not, for several minutes, alone in that room, though by any visible measure I remained entirely alone in it. I did not see him. I did not hear his voice. I simply felt his presence settle in beside me the way it always had. I am eighty-three now, a widow of eleven years, and I have spent considerable time since wondering whether this was simply the mind being merciful to itself in grief, manufacturing the comfort it desperately needed. I am not a woman inclined toward superstition, and Walter was not either. I record this only because there may be some other widow, some other widower, sitting alone in their own quiet room, who might find comfort in knowing the silence, however complete it appears, is not always entirely complete.