Dorothy wrote to us wanting to share her story anonymously. With her permission, we recreated her account. The words are ours. The shoebox is completely hers.
At my husband’s funeral, my best friend cried more than I did. I noticed it the way you notice something that doesn’t fit in a room. Not loud, not obvious, just wrong in a way you can’t name right away.
Gloria was in the third row, which was already strange because I had asked her to sit with me in the front. She said she needed space to breathe. I didn’t question it because Gloria had always been particular about things like that, and I had spent forty years learning which of her particularities to question and which ones to let pass.
But I watched her.
Between greeting people and accepting hugs from Raymond’s colleagues and nodding at things people said that I was not fully hearing, I watched her. And what I saw was a woman grieving in a way that I was not grieving. Not performing grief. Not doing what you do at funerals to show respect. Actually grieving.
Her shoulders shaking in a way she was trying to control and couldn’t. Her hand pressed flat against her chest, like she was trying to hold something in. Her eyes never going to the casket directly, always slightly to the left of it, like looking at it straight was more than she could do.
I filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and kept moving through the day the way you do.
My name is Dorothy May Caldwell. People who know me call me Dot. I’m seventy-one years old. I taught third grade for twenty-eight years at the same elementary school in Atlanta, and fourteen months ago I buried Raymond, my husband of forty-three years.
What I’m going to tell you today is something I have not told my children, something I have not told anyone, and something I am still, if I’m being honest with you, deciding what to do with.
Raymond and I met when I was twenty-six and he was twenty-nine. I was finishing my teaching certification. He was working in insurance, which he would do for the rest of his life, and he had the kind of steadiness about him that I mistook for peace for a long time and only later understood was simply his nature.
He wasn’t a turbulent man. He wasn’t a man who raised his voice or broke things or disappeared for days. He was present, reliable, and contained in a way that made him easy to be married to, and sometimes hard to truly reach.
