The List My Husband Left in His Handwriting

Three months after Roy died, I finally made myself walk out to his workshop behind our house in Newberg, and taped to the inside of the tool cabinet, folded once down the middle in his blocky pencil handwriting, was a single sheet of paper that said only "for after."

I'm going to tell you what was on it, all ten lines, because I know that's why you're here, and because Roy would have hated a person being made to wait for the point. He was a man who read the last page of a mystery novel first, standing in the store, and then decided whether to buy it. So I'll do it his way. But I want you to understand a few things before I unfold that paper for you, so it lands on you the way it landed on me, sitting cross-legged on a concrete floor that was too cold for a woman of sixty-four to be sitting on.

The man who loved in tasks

Roy and I were married forty-one years. He built things. Cabinets, a canoe once, the arbor over our back gate that the clematis took over so completely you couldn't tell there was wood under it anymore. He was not a man who said tender things out loud. In four decades I could count on my hands the times he told me he loved me in those words, and they were all attached to something else — a hospital, a funeral, the night our daughter was born in the middle of an ice storm in Salem. He showed it instead. He'd warm the car up for me on cold mornings. He'd cut the crust off my toast without being asked because I mentioned once, in 1986, that I didn't care for it. That was Roy. He loved in tasks.

So it made a terrible kind of sense that when he knew he was dying — and he knew for about seven weeks, though we only said the word "hospice" to each other twice — he did not write me a love letter. He wrote me a list. A to-do list. Because in his whole life, a list was the most sincere thing Roy Ellison knew how to make.

I should tell you it took me three months to find it, and that's because for three months I could not make myself open the workshop door. It sat there at the back of the property, forty feet from the kitchen window, and I would look at it while I did the dishes and my chest would go tight. His truck was still parked beside it. His boots were still by the back step where he'd stepped out of them. The whole building was holding its breath, and so was I. Our daughter kept offering to "help me go through his things," in that bright brave voice people use, and I kept saying not yet, not yet, until one Saturday in April I woke up and the not-yet had worn off, the way it does, without warning, and I walked out there in my nightgown and my garden clogs before I could talk myself out of it and I opened the door.

The list, exactly as he wrote it

Here it is, exactly as it was written, under the heading "for after."

One. Take the long way home by the water. Every time. You've got the time now.

Two. Learn to make the coffee the way you actually like it. I've been making it weak for thirty years because that's how I take it, and you never once said. Make it strong. Burn your tongue.

Three. Sell the boat to somebody young. Don't let it sit under a tarp turning into a lecture about me. Take the money and do number eight.

Four. Finish the garden room. We could have afforded it in 2009. I told you we couldn't, and that was me being scared of what things cost, not us not having it. I'm sorry I made you wait fifteen years for a room with good light. Build it. Put your chair in it.

Five. Call your sister back the same day. You always wait three days so you don't seem eager. She's your sister. Be eager.

Six. Give my flannel shirts to the men's shelter in McMinnville, all but the green one. Keep the green one. You know why.

Seven. Don't let anybody, our daughter especially, move you into a smaller life to make themselves feel better. You are not fragile. You changed a tire in the rain on the 99W the year we met and I fell in love with you doing it.

Eight. Go to the coast in the off-season, when it's empty and mean, and stay three nights, not one. Stand out on the sand at Cape Kiwanda and yell if you want to. Nobody's out there.

Nine. Stop apologizing for the second helping. For the second helping, the second glass, the second anything. You've earned a whole life of seconds.

Ten. Marge — you are going to think, for a while, that the point of you was me. It wasn't. It was never me. Go find out what it was. That's the whole list. That's the only thing I ever really wanted for you and I was too much of a coward to say it while I was in the room to see your face.

The one that put me on the floor

I got to number four and had to stop. That's the one that put me on the floor. Because the garden room was real — a little sunroom off the kitchen that I'd wanted since our knees started to go, someplace with light to sit in during the gray Willamette winters that go on from October clear to May. I'd brought it up once. He'd said the word "expensive" and I'd folded it away and never mentioned it again, and I had told myself for fifteen years that I didn't really mind, that it hadn't mattered. Reading in his own hand that he'd known — that he'd carried it as a debt, that he'd been scared of money the way his father was scared of money, and that he was using some of his last clear hours to apologize for a room — I came apart. I sat on that cold concrete among the sawdust and the smell of him, machine oil and cedar, and I cried the way you cry when there's nobody in the house to hear you and no reason left to keep it quiet.

Then I read the rest. Then I read the whole thing again. Then I did something I hadn't done in three months, which was laugh, because number two is such a Roy thing to notice, thirty years of weak coffee, and because "burn your tongue" is, I think, the most romantic sentence anyone has ever written to me.

What I did with it

I want to tell you what I did with the list, because a list is only a wish until somebody acts on it, and I decided the least I could do for a man who spent forty-one years doing things for me was to do these ten things back.

I took the long way home by the water that first evening, along the river road, and I have taken it every time since, even when it adds twenty minutes, even in the dark. I make my coffee strong enough now that our daughter winced at it. I sold the boat in April to a young couple from Dundee who are going to fish the Willamette with their kids, and I did not cry when the trailer pulled out of the drive, which surprised me. I called the contractor in May. The garden room is being framed as I write this — I can hear the nail gun — and I have already bought the chair, a wide one, the color of a robin's egg, and I put it where the morning light will hit it, and I am going to sit in it and be a person Roy apologized to, which is a strange and holy thing to get to be.

Number five, calling my sister the same day, I have found is the hardest of all of them, harder than selling the boat, because it means undoing a habit I didn't even know was a habit until Roy named it in pencil. He was right, of course. For my whole adult life I let three days go by before I returned Carol's calls, some prideful little arithmetic about not seeming lonely, not seeming like the sister who needed the other one more. The first time I called her back the same afternoon, she said, "Well, that was quick," and I nearly cried into the phone, because there it was, forty years of the thing Roy had watched me do, answered in a single quick phone call. We talk almost every day now. She has become, in my widowhood, the person I speak to most, and I have my dead husband's pencil to thank for it.

I gave the flannels to the shelter in McMinnville. I kept the green one. I sleep in it more nights than I'll admit. The green one is the flannel he was wearing the first night I ever stayed at his place, in 1982, a fact I did not think he remembered and he clearly did, and "you know why" is the tenderest two words the man ever wrote me.

I have not yet gone to the coast and yelled. I'm saving number eight. I think I know that once I do the last few, the list is finished, and some part of me is not ready for there to be nothing left of his handwriting to obey.

What the list was really for

Here is the thing I have come to understand, three months turning into six, sitting in a room full of light he told me to build. Roy did not leave me instructions because he thought I couldn't manage without him. He left them because he'd spent his whole quiet life watching me make myself smaller — the weak coffee, the room I stopped asking for, the three-day wait before I called my own sister, the apology before the second helping — and he could not stand the idea of me getting even smaller now that he was gone. The list wasn't a to-do list. It was a man saying, in the only language he was fluent in, get bigger. Take up the room. You were never the supporting part.

If you have a Roy — a good, undemonstrative, task-shaped person who loves you in warmed-up cars and crusts cut off toast — I want to say two things to you. Tell them out loud what you'd want done "for after," so nobody has to find it folded in a cabinet. And in the meantime, before any of that, ask them for the room. Ask for the strong coffee. Don't make them spend their last clear afternoon apologizing for the seconds you talked yourself out of. Take up the room now, while the person who loves you is still here to see your face while you do it.

That was always the whole list.