People assume that silence in this situation is weakness or fear. What they don’t understand is that silence can also be a decision.
I am seventy-one years old. I have been making decisions for seventy-one years and I know the difference between a decision and an avoidance.
What I was deciding was this: What did I want from a confrontation? Not what did I deserve. What did I want?
Did I want an explanation? I had the letters.
Did I want an apology from a woman who had never acknowledged there was anything to apologize for and who had now watched her silence become permanent because Raymond was gone?
Did I want to see what Gloria’s face did when I let her know that I knew?
I thought about that last one longer than I want to admit.
—
What I kept coming back to was what it would cost me. Not in any abstract sense. What it would cost me specifically.
The friendship, which was already not the same friendship it had been six weeks ago and which would never again be exactly what it had been before I sat on the edge of my bed with that shoe box.
My children’s image of their father, which was not mine to dismantle.
My own peace, which was fragile and new and the most valuable thing I had.
I thought about the version of myself that would feel better after saying everything I knew. And I thought about the version of myself that would have to live in the aftermath of that. With a friendship destroyed and a family disrupted and a confrontation that could never undo what had already been done.
I chose the version that I could live with.
That is not forgiveness. I want to be clear about that because forgiveness is a word people reach for in situations like this and it does not apply here. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
What I chose was not to let this be the thing that defined the rest of my life.
I am seventy-one years old. I have things I want to do and mornings I want to wake up to and grandchildren who need a grandmother who is present. I made a decision about where my energy was going to go.
And it was not going to go into a confrontation with a woman who couldn’t give me back anything I had lost.
—
Gloria and I still speak. Less than before. The Tuesday dinners have not returned and I don’t think they will. She has not asked me directly why there is distance and I have not offered an explanation.
What we have now is something smaller and more careful than what we had, and maybe that is honest in a way the old version wasn’t.
There are things I still don’t know. Whether it had been ongoing or truly finished. Whether it had been love or something else. Whether Raymond had thought of her in the two years he was sick when I was the one in the room with him holding his hand, learning every protocol and every medication and every small way to make his remaining time better.
Whether she had.
Those questions don’t have answers available to me, and I have had to learn to set them down. Not permanently. They come back. But I set them down again.
What I know is this: I loved Raymond with the love of a long marriage, which is not the love of a beginning. It is something more complicated and more durable and more specific than that. It contains all the years and all the ordinary days and all the small ways two people build a life together.
His being who he was, all of who he was including the part I found in that box, doesn’t erase those forty-three years. It changes how I understand them. But it doesn’t erase them.
And I know that the woman crying in the third row at my husband’s funeral loved him, too, in whatever form that love took. And that she has to live with what she knows the same way I live with what I know.
That is not nothing. That is its own kind of weight.
