“He always took good care of me,” she said. “We would have been married for 57 years later this year. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“I know,” I said. “He was such a good man. It feels like he retired yesterday and was just getting comfortable with retirement, spending time in Florida to break up the Vermont winters.”
“I don’t know,” she worried, “how I’m going to handle all of this, the money, on my own.”
“I’ll help you,” I reassured her. “I feel like every time we spoke, you were there too.”
“A lot of the times I was,” she said.
“I know,” I replied.
“At the end of our calls, he would always say to me, ‘You take good care now.’”
“He was a gentle, sweet man,” she said.
And now he’s gone.
What else is there to say? The end is a shock. You just don’t know how you’re going to handle it. How could you?
The life you had together was the one you knew. You both had those important kitchen table conversations. You knew what it felt like to save ‘til it hurt. “Can’t we spend some of this money, honey?” you would ask. And up until recently, you were wondering the same thing.
After my conversations with him, when you asked what we had talked about, I know he would say, “Nothing really, just catching up.” And I know you thought, “Thanks, no wonder investing is impossible to understand.” But you did hear the most important thing, and that was who you need to call, which I hoped you would never have to do.
Goodbye, my friend. You take good care.
Read the entire series here.
