My name is Clara. I am 83 years old, and I have been a widow for four months. For 63 years, my husband never forgot Valentine’s Day. Not once. Through lean years and prosperous ones, through joy and grief, through arguments and reconciliations, there were always flowers. He proposed to me on February 14, 1962. We were both twenty and foolish in the way only young people in love can be. His name was Henry. He borrowed the tiny communal kitchen in our college dorm and attempted to cook dinner. The spaghetti was overboiled. The sauce came straight from a jar. The garlic bread was burned so badly on one side that he tried to hide it by turning the slices over. We ate anyway, laughing until we cried.
After dinner, he handed me a small bouquet of roses wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. He had worked two weeks washing dishes in the campus cafeteria to afford a thin silver ring with a modest diamond chip that winked shyly in the light. “Marry me, Clara,” he said. His voice trembled despite the grin he tried to maintain. I said yes before he could lose his nerve. From that day forward, February 14 belonged to us. Every year, without fail, Henry brought me flowers. When we were newlyweds living in a cramped apartment with peeling wallpaper and a faucet that dripped all night, he arrived with wildflowers gathered from a field on the edge of town. When he earned his first promotion at the firm, he came home with long-stemmed roses arranged in a crystal vase. He looked absurdly proud of himself.
The year we lost our second baby, a tiny boy we never even had the chance to name, he brought me daisies. I remember opening the door and seeing them in his hands. I broke down before he could speak. He wrapped his arms around me and whispered, “Even in the hardest years, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” The flowers were never just about romance. They were proof. Proof that no matter what storms we weathered, whether money troubles, sleepless nights with sick children, my father’s slow decline, or my own stretches of quiet sadness, Henry always came back. And he came back carrying something beautiful.
Then, last October, he did not come back. It was sudden. A heart attack in the early morning hours. The doctor told me it was quick and that he had not suffered. I nodded politely, as though that were a comfort. The house felt cavernous without him. His slippers still waited by our bed. His reading glasses rested on the side table next to the novel he would never finish. In the kitchen, his favorite mug hung from its hook, stubborn and ordinary.READ MORE BELOW
