PART 2
When I found out I was going to Vietnam, I told her I could not imagine leaving without marrying her first.
I was twenty-six years old.
I was not brave about it. I was frightened — properly frightened, in the way you are at twenty-six when something has a date attached to it.
I wanted one true thing to hold on to over there. And I said all of that very badly, in a car, outside her mother's house, at about eleven at night.
She said yes. Immediately, in a parked car, in the dark. Before I had finished the sentence, which she never let me forget.
So we got married, eleven days later, because that was what we had.
Even now I can picture exactly what she wore.
A simple white summer dress covered in tiny pale-blue flowers.
She made it herself. On a borrowed machine, over about four evenings, out of material from a shop on the corner of a street that is now a bank.
It is in a box in the spare room. I have not opened the box and I am not going to this year.
We had no money, so afterwards we celebrated at a little roadside diner about eleven miles out of town.
She had the chicken. She always had the chicken; it is on the menu of my entire life.
I had something I cannot remember to this day, and she teased me about not remembering it for four decades, every time we drove past that road.
There was nothing grand about any of it.
Four people, a borrowed car, a dress made on a kitchen table, and a diner with vinyl seats eleven miles out of town.
And I do not remember ever being happier. Not before and not since, and I have had sixty good years to be happier in.
A few days later I left.
We wrote to each other whenever we could.
I counted the days between her letters. The worst gap was nineteen days and I can still feel the shape of it in my chest sixty years later.
She wrote about ordinary things. The weather, a neighbour, a job she had taken in an office. Four pages at a time, in that handwriting.
She never once wrote anything heavy in a year of letters.
Not one line about being frightened, or lonely, or about what she was waiting through.
I understood that at the time as her being cheerful for me, and I was proud of her for it, and I told other men in that unit that my wife was a cheerful writer.
I understand it rather differently this week.
About a year after that I came home to her for good.
She was at the gate. She was wearing something blue and she had cut her hair and I did not recognise her for about half a second, which I have never told anybody until now.
That is one of the best days of my life and there is no competition for second place.
From there we built everything.
Three children — two boys and a girl, between 1968 and 1974.
Later, five grandchildren. She spoiled every single one of them in a way I was never once permitted to raise at a table.
A house we paid off in 1994, with a party in the garden and a mortgage certificate she framed herself.
Four cars over the years, all of them hers in practice. One dog, badly behaved, for eleven years.
That is a life. I would not swap one week of it.
This year we marked sixty years.
There was a cake. There were about forty people in our front room and the back door was open because of the heat. My eldest made a speech that went on too long and she held my hand under the table through all of it.
Not long after that, she passed quietly, at about four in the morning, while I sat beside her holding her hand.
There was nothing dramatic about it. Her breathing changed and then it stopped, and a nurse came in, and that was the whole of it.
I stayed with her until the end.
Eleven days in that room. I would like anybody reading this to know that she was not on her own for one minute of it, because it is the only thing in the whole of this account that I did right.
