“Section 4, under the oak” the groundskeeper said, and I remember thinking that sounded too peaceful for something that had been sitting in my chest like a stone for forty-nine years.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that now. Since Harold passed in March, my brain just kind of jumps between things and I have to keep pulling it back. Bear with me.

Harold died on a Tuesday. A regular Tuesday, which somehow made it worse. He’d been having coffee at the kitchen table and then he wasn’t, and the coffee was still hot when the paramedics arrived. That detail shouldn’t matter but it’s the one I keep coming back to. Still hot. Like he’d just stepped out.

For about two weeks after the funeral I just sort of floated around the house. My daughter Renee came and stayed, and my son Paul called every day, and everyone brought food like they do, and I said thank you and ate almost none of it. You know how that goes. Or maybe you don’t. I hope you don’t.

Then the practical things started needing doing. The insurance papers, the bank accounts, the deed to the farm. Harold had always handled the paperwork side of things, not because I couldn’t but because he was particular about it. He had a system in that rolltop desk of his, folders for everything, labeled in his handwriting. Going through it the first time felt obscene, honestly. Like reading someone’s diary. Even after fifty-one years of marriage.

I found the insurance policy right where Renee said it would be, in the green folder at the back. I was almost done, almost ready to close the whole desk up and leave it for another week, when I saw a smaller folder tucked under the accordion file in the bottom drawer. No label on it. That was unusual for Harold. Everything had a label.

Inside were receipts. Annual receipts from Cedar Hill Cemetery going back to 1975. “Perpetual Care, Section 4, Lot 7.” Paid every January. Fifty years of January payments, give or take, in Harold’s handwriting on the check stubs, and then later printed from the cemetery’s billing system when everything went digital. The most recent one was dated January of this year. Four months before he died.

I sat on the floor in front of that desk for a long time. I’m not sure how long.

In 1975 we lost a baby girl. She was three days old. I don’t talk about this and I never have, so I’m going to try to get through it plainly. She came early, there were complications the doctors hadn’t caught, and she lived for three days and then she didn’t. That’s the shape of it. Harold and I were twenty-nine years old and we had a two-year-old at home and we were in over our heads in a farmhouse we were still paying off and the world just kept moving whether we wanted it to or not.