My husband brought home a yellow tulip every single Sunday for 32 years. After he passed away, someone kept bringing one to his grave every Sunday without fail for three years. I had no idea who it was.
When I finally found out, it was the last person on Earth I would have guessed. The first Sunday after Jack’s funeral, I went to the cemetery alone. I had his favorite coffee mug in my tote bag, the one with the crack along the handle that he had refused to throw away for 11 years.
I sat beside Jack’s headstone for an hour and talked to him about nothing in particular, because that had always been the best kind of conversation we had. I went back the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and every Sunday since. We had been together for 32 years.
I was 59 when I lost Jack. Our children were grown and living across the country. And for the first time since we were very young, it was just me in the house, which was painfully haunting.
The Sundays were the hardest. Jack had always been a Sunday person. He made breakfast and read the paper out loud to me, whether I was listening or not.
He would come home from his Sunday morning walks with a yellow tulip from the flower shop every single week without exception. “They look like sunlight, darling!” Jack would say. “And sunlight is what you look like when you smile!”
I used to roll my eyes at him.
I would give anything to roll my eyes at him one more time. The tulips had started on the Sunday we met. I was carrying groceries home from the market, and I dropped the bag on the sidewalk right in front of him.
Jack crouched down and helped me gather everything up, and then held out a yellow tulip he had just bought. I looked at him like he had said something in the wrong language. Then I smiled.
And that’s how 32 years of Sundays grew from that one moment on a sidewalk. It hurt so much to see that flower again after my Jack was gone. It appeared for the first time about two weeks after the funeral.
I almost didn’t notice it at first. I was arranging the candles I had brought when I saw a single yellow tulip already there, leaning against Jack’s headstone. Someone had brought it and placed it with care.
I stood there for a long time, looking at it. I asked our children first, and they said they hadn’t even visited the cemetery. I asked Jack’s friends from the hardware store where he had worked for 30 years.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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