My husband Thomas had been gone for 16 days when the hospice nurse called me and asked a question I never expected to hear.
“Do you know a woman named Maryanne?”
I was sitting at my kitchen table, writing thank-you notes to people who had brought casseroles after the funeral.
I almost laughed.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
There was a long silence on the other end.
Then Nurse Paula said something that made my hand stop moving.
“He asked for her at the end.”
I stared at the unfinished sentence on the card in front of me.
“What do you mean?”
“He asked for her three times.”
My stomach tightened.
Then Paula told me the words Thomas had spoken during his final hours.
“Tell Maryanne I kept the blue house.”
I wrote the sentence on the back of a sympathy card because I didn’t trust myself to remember it.
Tell Maryanne I kept the blue house.
