The funeral was a pageant of well-meaning lies. “He loved you so much,” they said. “You were his world,” they whispered, hugging me while I stood by the casket, numb and trembling. I accepted their comfort, believing it. I believed we were a tragedy—a love story cut short by a cruel twist of fate.
My husband died of a heart attack. It was sudden. Violent. Instant. One minute he was drinking coffee, the next he was gone.
A week after the funeral, I finally gathered the strength to deal with the administration of death. I went into his study to sort through the finances. I needed the insurance policies, the deed to the house. I spun the dial on his heavy steel safe, the combination etched into my memory from years of shared secrets.
I found the insurance policy. I found the will. And underneath them, I found a manila envelope I didn’t recognize.
I opened it.
It wasn’t a love letter. It wasn’t a surprise gift.
While going through his safe, I found divorce papers.
I stared at the document, the legal jargon swimming before my eyes. My breath hitched. I flipped to the last page, looking for a date, hoping this was some old draft from a rough patch years ago.
It wasn’t.
They were signed and notarized three days before he died.
The ink was barely dry. While I was planning our summer vacation, he was sitting in a notary’s office, signing away our future. I checked his calendar on the desk, looking at the dates. There, on the upcoming Saturday—the weekend after he died—was a circled date with a note: Move out.
He was planning to leave me that weekend.
The grief that had been drowning me suddenly turned into a confusing, hot sludge. I wasn’t just a widow; I was a rejected wife who got saved by the bell. The tears I had cried at the funeral felt stolen. The sympathy I had received felt like a sham.
I had to mourn a man who had already decided I wasn’t worth staying for.
I sat on the floor of his study, holding the proof of his abandonment. I realized I couldn’t even be angry at him, because he was gone. I couldn’t ask him why. I couldn’t scream. I was trapped in a bizarre purgatory of grief and rejection.
I was a widow to a marriage that was already dead. The heart attack had stopped his heart, but he had already killed “us” three days prior. I was left to grieve a man who, in spirit, had already walked out the door.
