Six days after Larry’s funeral, a thick white envelope arrived in my mailbox. I recognized his unsteady handwriting immediately. The postmark showed that he had mailed it the day before he passed away. Less than a month earlier, he had been sitting outside my subway station with a cardboard sign: “MARRY ME. I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.” I had known him for two years, regularly stopping with coffee, food, or other supplies. When he explained that he had advanced liver failure, he also told me he feared having nobody to claim him or arrange his burial. Two days later, we married at the courthouse. He wore a clean blue shirt, and I wore my navy work dress. Our marriage lasted three weeks.
His letter began with an apology. The diagnosis had been real, he explained, but his final arrangements were already settled. He had not needed a wife to prevent an unidentified burial. “If I gave you a problem you could solve, I knew you’d solve it,” he wrote. I felt hurt as I read those words. I cared about him, but he had persuaded me to make an important decision without telling me the whole truth. At the bottom of the page, he asked me to return to the courthouse, speak with a clerk named Margaret, and introduce myself as his wife. Wanting to understand what else he had left unsaid, I went that afternoon.
Margaret recognized Larry’s name and told me he had worked at the courthouse for twenty-eight years, much of that time processing marriage licenses. After retirement, illness and mounting medical expenses had exhausted his savings. Eventually, he lost his apartment. Embarrassment had kept him from asking former coworkers for help. She took me into the room where we had exchanged vows and opened a binder containing old marriage records. Again and again, I saw Larry’s signature beside couples who had arrived without someone to serve as their witness. For years, he had stood beside strangers during one of their most important moments. Margaret then showed me the certificate from our ceremony, which Larry had asked her to preserve. Until our wedding, he had never been married himself.