“I’m so sorry,” I breathed, completely caught off guard. “But… marriage?”
“I just don’t want to die as a John Doe, Sarah,” he whispered, his eyes filling with tears. “I want to belong to someone on paper. I want someone to claim my ashes when the city tries to throw me in an unmarked grave.”
I have always been too empathetic for my own good. I was single, pragmatic, and my heart broke for him. Two days later, we went to the city courthouse and signed the papers. It wasn’t a real marriage. It was just a legal technicality to give a dying man some dignity.
Exactly three weeks later, he passed away in a state hospice facility.
Yesterday, when I checked my mail, there was a thick envelope waiting for me, postmarked the day before he died.
I sat at my kitchen table and unfolded the handwritten pages, fully expecting a sweet, heartbreaking thank-you note.
The homeless man I married drank his coffee black outside my subway stop. After his funeral, his last letter opened with an apology I couldn’t understand and sent me back to the courthouse. There, a clerk opened a record book, found his name on hundreds of pages, and asked which Larry I had married.
