She got there before me and had already bought my coffee.
I like starting there because it tells you a lot. I was the one who’d extended the invitation. I was the one who supposedly had something to offer. And I walked up to her, sitting at a table outside, to find a cup already waiting for me, and a woman who had thought far enough ahead to guess what I’d want.
We’d met a few weeks earlier at my author event at the library here in my town. She was the first one to come up afterward—eager, but a little hesitant. She asked if she should buy a book, and while I inscribed it, she told me she’d lost her wife. And with those few words and my scrawling in a book, I realized we were both standing on the same piece of ground.
We chatted for a few minutes, and when I moved back to the table to sign more books, I said, “Let’s get coffee sometime.” And I meant it.
I’ve said yes to a lot of things over the last few years without knowing where they’d lead. This one led to a two-hour afternoon table and a version of myself I’m still excited to get to know.
She brought photographs.
Her wife’s name was Angela—Angie. I asked a lot of questions—more than I meant to, probably—because I’ve been on the other side of that table, and I know what it’s like when people are afraid to ask. They think they’re protecting you. What they’re actually doing is making your person disappear a little faster.
So I asked. What did she do? What was she like when she was happy? What did she used to say that you still catch yourself saying?
Some of what she told me was beautiful. Some of it wasn’t. There was an illness, the long stretch of caregiving that comes with it, and the part after. She didn’t soften any of it, which I appreciated, because I don’t think she’d been given many rooms where she didn’t have to.
At one point she said something that I keep turning over. She said it helped to talk to someone who got all of it. Not a piece of it. All of it—being gay, loving someone for years, watching cancer take them, doing the hospice math, and then walking out the other side into a world that expects you to be roughly the same person.
Most people in her life can hold one or two of those. Very few can hold the whole stack at once. I could. Not because I’m insightful. Because I’ve carried the same stack.
Before we left, she pulled out a piece of paper.
She’d seen a quote somewhere—Facebook, I think. She’d copied it down. Then she’d gone home and rewritten it by hand, carefully, on beautiful paper, so she could give it to me.
And when she handed it over, she said, “I thought about Ken and you.”
Ken and you.
She said his name first.
I don’t know if she knows she did that. I doubt she planned it. But fifteen years on, there is still nothing—no review, no award, no sold-out room—that lands the way it lands when a person who never met my husband says his name out loud like he’s someone worth mentioning. Because he is.
We hugged goodbye on the sidewalk, and I got about ten steps toward my car before my eyes welled with tears. I want to be precise about why, because I got it wrong at first. I assumed I was crying about her story. Grief begets grief, and hers had plenty of edges to catch on.
But that wasn’t it.
I was crying because of the connection. Because two people who had every reason to be alone in their specific losses had sat at a table for two hours and weren't alone, and that is rarer than it should be.
And I was crying because of something quieter underneath it, which is harder to admit without sounding like I’ve got it all figured out. Walking to my car, I had this very plain thought:
That was the right place for me to be.
Not a good deed. Not a nice afternoon. The right place. Like a puzzle piece, clickly neatly, snapping into place.
The sweet prose she wrote out and gave to me.
I’ve been building toward grief coaching for a while now. Coursework, certification, all the unglamorous scaffolding. I’ve written about it here, and I’ve talked about it on video, and I’ve had entire weeks where I wondered whether I was constructing an elaborate excuse to keep talking about the worst thing that ever happened to me.
That afternoon answered the question, and it didn’t do it with a lightning bolt. It did it with a receipt.
Here’s what I actually did for two hours: I asked about Angie. I listened. I didn’t fix anything, because nothing was broken in a way that fixing applies to. I didn’t offer a framework or a stage of grief or a book recommendation, including my own. (Also, I didn’t have to since she already had a copy😘.)
I sat there while a woman said her wife’s name as many times as she wanted to.
That’s the work. That’s the whole thing. It doesn’t look like much written down, which is exactly why so few people do it.
I’ve spent fifteen years learning how to be in a room with somebody’s worst thing without flinching, without rushing them, without needing them to be okay so that I can be okay. I didn’t sign up for that education. But I’ve got it. And it turns out it’s the only credential this job requires.
The path to it has felt organic in a way almost nothing else in my life has. Not a pivot. A continuation. Everything I did to survive Ken’s death was, apparently, also training.
We parted knowing we’d see each other again. And the next time, I’m buying the coffee!
If you’re reading this and you’re carrying somebody—a spouse, a friend, a person the world has quietly stopped asking you about—here’s the only thing I know for certain: Say their name. Out loud, to someone. Preferably to someone who won’t change the subject.
And if someone says yours back to you first, the way she did for me, let it land. That’s not a small thing. That’s someone deciding your person still counts.
Write on!
Ron
Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.