My family refused to pick me up from the airport after I buried my husband overseas — the next evening, they saw something on the news they never expected
My husband, Edmund, died after forty years of marriage.
For almost eighteen months, we had tried everything the doctors suggested. New medications. Experimental treatments. A clinic in Switzerland that gave us one final reason to fir hope.
In the end, hope was not enough.
Edmund was born near Zurich, and before he became too weak to speak for long, he asked me to bury him beside his parents.
So I did.
I stood in cold rain while the man who had slept beside me for four decades was lowered into the earth.
Then I boarded a plane home alone.
By the time I landed, I had barely slept in three days.
My eyes felt full of sand. My clothes still smelled faintly of the lilies from the funeral.
