By the spring of 1972, I was hollowed out. I stopped looking at the mail truck. I put the blue tin box at the very bottom of my cedar chest, underneath my winter blankets. I decided that Eddie was gone, and that I had to find a way to live with that quiet ache.

I met Kenneth a year later at a church social in DeKalb. He was a quiet, solid man who worked at the local grain elevator. He wore clean denim shirts and spoke only when he had something necessary to say. He was safe. He was alive. When Kenneth asked me to marry him on the porch of his parents’ house, I said yes. I loved him, but it was a different kind of love. It was steady. It didn’t keep me awake at night.

Fifty years passed like a train clicking along the tracks. We had Sarah, then David, and finally little Kenny. We bought the ranch house on Maple Street. We put a tire swing in the oak tree in the backyard. My life was full of laundry, school lunches, and Friday night fish fries. But every now and then, when the autumn rain hit the windows in a certain way, my mind would slip back to the red clay of Kentucky.

Kenneth retired from the grain elevator in 2010. His joints were stiff from the cold winters, and he spent his afternoons watching the Cubs on television. He was a good husband. He never raised his voice, and he always held the door for me when we went to Meijer. But we were like two old trees planted close together. Our roots were tangled, but we didn’t really touch anymore.

When Kenneth’s heart finally gave out last autumn while he was sitting in his recliner, I didn’t scream or cry.

I just stood there in the living room, staring at him, because my brain genuinely stopped working for a second. I called the ambulance, but I knew he was already gone. After the funeral, the house became a tomb. The kids came and went, offering to help me pack up his things, but I told them I wanted to do it myself.

That brings me back to this morning. I had spent three days in the attic and the garage, sorting through fifty years of Kenneth’s life. I found his old army duffel bag tucked behind some cardboard boxes of holiday decorations. The green canvas was stiff and stained with grease. It took me ten minutes with a pair of rusty pliers to get the brass zipper to budge.

Inside were his uniforms from Munich. They were perfectly preserved, still holding the faint scent of the laundry soap they used on the base in 1968. I decided to take them to the VFW Post 2245. It was a rainy Tuesday morning, the sky the color of a wet slate. I drove slowly, my windshield wipers squeaking against the glass.