For three long years, my husband Harold’s heavy brown work boots sat untouched by the back door. The mud on the left sole was still perfectly caked on from the very last morning he wore them before he passed away. For over a thousand days, I walked past those boots.

I swept around them, I vacuumed near them, and I looked at them every single time I grabbed my coat to leave the house. I treated them like a quiet, sacred monument to the life we had built together. I just couldn’t bear to move them.

To anyone else visiting the house, it probably looked messy or eccentric. My sister used to give them a long look every time she came over for coffee, gently suggesting that maybe it was time to clear out the entryway. But she didn’t understand. Moving those boots meant admitting the absolute permanence of his absence.

It meant accepting that he was never going to walk through that back door again, heavily kick them off onto the mat, sigh a deep breath of exhaustion, and ask what was for dinner. Leaving them there made it feel like he had just stepped out for a minute.

Harold and I were married for forty-four years. If I am being completely honest—and I feel like I finally can be—it wasn’t a romance out of a movie. Harold was a good man, a fiercely loyal man, but he was incredibly stoic. He belonged to a generation and a mindset of men who believed that bringing home a paycheck and keeping a roof over our heads was the ultimate declaration of love.

He wasn’t a man who talked about his feelings. He wasn’t a man who wrote things down. In over four decades together, I received exactly two greeting cards from him.

The first was on our tenth anniversary, and the second was on my fiftieth birthday.

Both were standard, store-bought cards with generic printed messages inside. Neither had a romantic, handwritten note. He had simply signed “Harold” at the bottom in his usual, hurried scrawl. There were years during our thirties and forties when his silence drove me absolutely crazy. I would see my friends receiving flowers for no reason, or I would hear them talk about the long conversations they had with their husbands, and a bitter knot of resentment would form in my stomach.

I spent so many nights lying awake next to him, listening to his deep, rhythmic breathing, wondering if he actually loved me or if I was just a comfortable habit he had formed. We had a quiet house. We raised our daughter, paid our mortgage, and lived a decent life, but I always felt a dull ache for a deeper emotional connection that he just couldn’t provide.

I eventually made peace with it. I learned to translate his actions into the words he couldn’t say.