The Stranger at the Grave Next to My Husband’s (Continued)

She was older than me, easily in her nineties, moving carefully with a cane, and when she saw me she stopped as if she’d been caught.

I stood and introduced myself. I told her I’d been visiting the grave beside hers for twenty years and had always wondered who tended the one with no headstone. She looked at me a long moment, then at Thomas’s stone, and her eyes filled.

‘That’s my son,’ she said softly. ‘He died when he was nineteen. A car, on the coast road, 1961.’ She had never been able to afford a proper headstone back then, she explained, and by the time she could, she found she preferred the little marker. ‘It’s humble,’ she said. ‘He was humble.’

Then she told me the part that undid me. She had noticed, years ago, that the grave beside her son’s was always visited by a woman with a thermos. ‘I used to bring an extra bunch of daisies sometimes,’ she admitted, ‘and leave a few on your husband’s stone too, on the weeks I worried no one had come. I didn’t like to think of him lonely next to my boy.’

For twenty years, this stranger had quietly been keeping my Thomas company on the mornings I couldn’t make it. And I had never known. We sat together on that bench until the sun was full up, two old women and the two men we’d never stopped loving.

Her name is Margaret. We visit together now, every Saturday, and we bring enough flowers for both graves. Neither of us has to keep watch alone anymore.