For 63 years, my husband never missed Valentine’s Day. Not once. After he died, I expected silence. Instead, roses appeared at my door, along with a key to an apartment he’d kept hidden for decades. What I found inside still brings me to tears.
My name is Daisy. I’m 83, and I’ve been a widow for four months.
My husband, Robert, proposed to me on Valentine’s Day in 1962. We were in college.
He cooked dinner in our dorm’s tiny shared kitchen. Spaghetti with jarred sauce. Garlic bread that was burned on one side.
I’ve been a widow for four months.
He gave me a small bouquet of roses wrapped in newspaper and a silver ring that cost him two weeks of dishwashing wages. From that moment on, we were never apart.
Every single Valentine’s Day after that, he brought me flowers.
Sometimes it was a small bouquet of wildflowers when we were broke and living in our first apartment with mismatched furniture and a leaky faucet. Sometimes it was long-stemmed roses when he got promoted.
Once, during the year we lost our second baby, he brought me daisies. I cried when I saw them.
We were never apart.
He held me and said, “Even in the hard years, I’m here, my love.”
The flowers weren’t just about romance. They were proof that Robert always came back.
Through arguments about money. Through sleepless nights with sick children. Through the year my mother died and I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks.
He always came back with flowers.
***
Robert died in the fall. Heart attack. The doctor said he didn’t suffer. But I did.
The house felt too quiet without him. His slippers still sat by the bed. His coffee mug still hung on the hook in the kitchen.
He always came back with flowers.
I set two cups of tea out of habit every morning, then remembered he wasn’t there to drink his.
I talked to his photograph every day. “Good morning, darling. I miss you.”
Sometimes I told him about my day. About what our grandchildren were doing. About the leak in the kitchen sink I couldn’t fix.
***
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