By admin@handinhandadventures.com 
Dear Ellen,
You’d laugh at what I’ve been doing on the computer. Forty-two years you watched me refuse to shop for anything – you bought my shoes, El, my own shoes – and now here I am at your kitchen table with reading glasses and a legal pad, six browser tabs deep into granite, because there is exactly one purchase left that is ours and I will not delegate it. I typed something into the search bar last Tuesday that I’m going to write out here because saying it plainly is the whole reason I’m managing any of this: companion headstone for my spouse. The search took me to a catalog of them – companion headstone for my spouse is the page, the double stones, the kind with two names – and I have been studying it the way I used to study the boat listings you pretended to tolerate. So this letter is my report to you, since you were always the one I reported to.
First, the part you already know, because you knew everything first: it’s going to be one stone. The cemetery man very gently showed me the option of two singles side by side and I heard your voice so clearly I almost turned around – Frank, we didn’t take separate vacations, we’re not taking separate rocks. One stone, wide, both names. The catalog calls it a companion monument, which is a better word than I expected the industry to have. Companion. That’s the job description, isn’t it. Forty-two years of it, and continuing.
Now the decisions, and El, there are more of them than either of us would have guessed, so I’m taking them the way you taught me to take everything – one at a time, out loud, with coffee.
The shape first. They make them flat in the grass, they make them slanted like a lectern, they make them standing up tall. I keep coming back to the standing kind, the upright, and I interrogated myself about why the way you’d have made me: it’s because I want your name at reading height, El. I’m seventy-four. I intend to visit for a good while yet, and I would like to talk to a stone I don’t have to kneel to, and someday the grandkids should be able to find us from the path. So: upright, wide. The gray granite, not the black – you wore gray your whole life, called it your color, and I’m not putting you under a color you’d have returned to the store.
The names. Here’s where I sat back in the chair for a while. They put both names on now, El – mine too, finished except the one date. The company says it’s normal, says most companion stones go up this way, says they keep the design on file forever so when my time comes the letters match exactly, same hand, same depth, like the stone was always whole and just waiting. I decided I like it. I more than like it. It means every visit I make, I’m visiting us – the thing we actually were – and it means the kids won’t have to arrange anything someday except a phone call. The lady at the showroom, when I got quiet about it, said the gentlest true thing: “Most husbands find it’s a comfort, seeing where they’ll be.” It is, El. It’s next to you. It was always going to be next to you.
The middle of the stone. This was your kind of decision – the designer asked what should go between the names, the thing the whole stone gathers around, and I didn’t even have to think. The date. June 14th, 1984, and underneath it the word you used to say when anyone asked the secret, the word I’m having them cut deepest of all: “Anyway.” The designer looked confused so I explained it the way you would have – that every fight we ever had ended with one of us saying it, I love you anyway, and after enough years it stopped needing the first three words. She wrote it down and said in fifteen years of this work it was her favorite epitaph. You’d have liked her. She uses her hands when she talks, like you.
Two vases, one on each side, cut out of one granite batch so they age with us. You know exactly why: your side is for the roses, and mine is so Margaret and the kids have somewhere to put things when they visit, because you always said flowers need a house or they’re just lying down on the job. The vases come as a matched pair. Everything about this stone comes as a matched pair. I find I keep noticing that.
The money, since you’d ask – you’d have loved this part, El, it’s a bargain and you know how you got about a bargain. There’s a discount for paying it all at once, a real one, and the whole thing – the wide upright, both engravings, the vases, shipping, everything – came in thousands under what your brother paid in ’19 for less stone. Free 3D picture first, two rounds of changes. I used both rounds. You’d have used four, but they only give two, and honestly the second version was right: your name first, on the left, the side you slept on.
They set it in October, before the ground hardens. I’ll be there when they finish – they call you first so the family sees it proper, which I thought was decent of them – and then I’ll come every Sunday the way I’ve been coming, except now there will be granite with your name deep in it, and June 14th, and Anyway, and a rose in your vase, and my own name beside yours, patient, no rush, keeping our place.
Forty-two years, El. One stone. I finally shopped for something myself, and I got it right, because I could hear you the entire time.
Anyway.
Frank
P.S. – For whoever finds this letter useful the way I’d have found one useful last Tuesday: the catalog is at memorystones.us. Bring your person’s voice with you. It turns out that’s the whole instruction manual.