My husband Richard died of a heart attack thirty-two years ago.

It happened on a Tuesday in March. He was in the driveway, scraping ice off the windshield of his Buick so he could drive to the airport for another work trip. I was inside packing Daniel’s lunch. I heard the scraper hit the ground.

I don’t remember much after that. I remember the ambulance lights on the snow. I remember Emma, who was twelve, standing in the doorway in her nightgown, holding her little brother’s hand. Daniel was nine. He kept asking, “Is Daddy going to the hospital? Is he going to be okay?”

He wasn’t.

He was thirty-eight years old.

Richard was my first love. We met in college, at a dance I didn’t want to go to. He stepped on my foot twice and apologized so many times that I finally laughed and said, “If you apologize one more time, I’m leaving.” He said, “Then I’ll just step on your foot again so you’ll stay.” We were married two years later.

After he died, there was a small life insurance policy, and the house, and me. That was it.

So I worked. I taught all day, and then I tutored kids after school, and in the summers I worked at a day camp and graded summer school papers at the kitchen table until midnight.

One night, Emma came downstairs at eleven o’clock and found me asleep with my cheek on a stack of spelling tests.

“Mom,” she said. “Why do you work so much?”

I sat up and wiped my face. There was a red ink smudge on my cheek. She laughed at it, but she didn’t look happy.

“Because I want you and Daniel to have everything you need, sweetheart.”

“And what about you?”

“I have you two,” I said. “That’s enough.”

She looked at me for a long time, the way only a twelve-year-old girl can look at you when she knows you’re not telling the whole truth.

Then she went back to bed.

I kept notebooks. I always had. Spiral ones from the drugstore, the kind with the cardboard covers that get soft at the corners. I wrote down things the kids said, funny things my students did, recipes, dreams I had at night, lists of places I wanted to go someday.

A few months after Richard died, I started writing letters to him in those notebooks.

Dear Richard, Daniel lost his first tooth at school today. He was so proud. He kept it in a little envelope and showed it to the mailman.

Dear Richard, the furnace broke. I called your brother. He said he’d come look at it, and then he didn’t come. I miss you most when things break.

Dear Richard, Emma got her driver’s license. She backed into the mailbox. I didn’t tell her you did the same thing when you were sixteen. I’m saving that for when she needs it.

One evening, Emma found me at the kitchen table writing.

“Who are you writing to, Mom?”

“Your dad, sweetheart.”

She frowned. “But he can’t read them.”

“I know,” I said. “But writing to him makes me feel like he’s still here.”

She didn’t say anything. She just put her hand on my shoulder for a second, and then she poured herself some milk and went upstairs.

I wrote to Richard for thirty-two years. I filled twenty-six notebooks. They’re in a cardboard box in my bedroom closet, labeled in black marker. RICHARD.

I never dated again. People tried to set me up. A widowed dentist from church. A gym teacher from another school. I went to dinner with the dentist once. He talked about his boat for an hour and a half. I went home and wrote Richard a very funny letter about it.

For thirty-two years, I believed I’d had a perfect love. Even if it had ended too soon.

I believed it the way you believe the sun will come up.

Three months after I retired, my doctor told me I had terminal cancer.

I’d been tired for a while. I thought it was just retirement. I thought my body was finally catching up on forty years of sleep. Then I started losing weight without trying, and there was a pain under my ribs that wouldn’t go away, and Emma made me go to the doctor.

Then there were scans. Then more scans. Then a biopsy.

Then a small room with a box of tissues on the table, which is how you know.

Dr. Patel was a kind man in his fifties with reading glasses on a cord around his neck. He’d been my doctor for fifteen years. He took his glasses off when I sat down.

“Mrs. Wilson,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

He told me what it was and where it had spread. I nodded like I was listening to a parent-teacher conference about somebody else’s child.

“Can you operate?” I asked.

“I’m afraid surgery won’t cure it, Mrs. Wilson.”

“Chemotherapy?”

“We can discuss treatment to manage your symptoms. To keep you comfortable.”

Comfortable. That’s the word they use when they mean the other thing.

“How much time?” I said.

“I can’t give you an exact number.”

“Please don’t protect my feelings,” I said. “I taught third grade for thirty-nine years. I’ve been lied to by experts. Just tell me.”

He sighed. He folded his glasses and held them in both hands.

“We may be talking about months rather than years.”

I nodded.

I thanked him. I actually thanked him. I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Doctor,” like he’d just told me my blood pressure was fine.

Then I walked out to the parking lot, got into my little silver Honda, put my hands on the steering wheel, and cried for almost an hour.

I didn’t turn the car on. I didn’t call anyone. A woman parked next to me, looked over, saw me, and then looked away very quickly, the way people do. She got out and went inside. When she came back forty minutes later, I was still there.

She knocked gently on my window.

I rolled it down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… do you need anything?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

She looked at me like she knew exactly what fine meant in a hospital parking lot. She nodded and went to her car.

I sat there another fifteen minutes.

Then I drove home and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich, because I didn’t know what else to do.