My daughter Clara asked the question on a Sunday in March, during the kind of afternoon that had become my entire life.
We were in the kitchen of my house on Maple Grove Lane, the house I had lived in for thirty-four years, the house where she and her brother Michael had grown up, the house where I had been conducting the very quiet existence of a widow for the past three years.
She had come for lunch.
She had brought the specific lunch she always brought, things from the deli around the corner from her apartment, and we had eaten at the kitchen table and talked about Michael’s children and about a program she was watching on television and about the garden, which needed attention I had not been giving it.
The afternoon had the quality that Sunday afternoons had acquired since Robert died, which was the quality of time being filled in a way that was pleasant and adequate and entirely without anything unexpected.
And then Clara put down her fork.
She looked at me.
She said: Mom.
I said: yes.
She said: when was the last time you did something just because it made you happy?
I did not have an answer.
Not because I was trying to remember.
Because there was no answer to find.
I had not done something just because it made me happy in so long that the category had stopped being one I checked.
Clara looked at me the way she had been looking at me for three years.
Not with pity.
With concern.
The specific concern of a person watching someone they love get smaller and quieter and more confined in a way that the person themselves cannot see.
She said: you should travel.
I said: I’m sixty-seven, Clara.
She said: yes. And?
I said: it seems a bit late to start.
She said: late for what?
I did not have an answer to that either.
My name is Margaret Henley.
I was a primary school librarian for thirty-one years.
I met Robert at a library conference in 1979 and we were married for forty-two years and we had two children and the specific kind of marriage that is not dramatic but is deeply comfortable, built from the accumulation of ordinary days shared by two people who liked each other as well as loved each other.
He died of a heart attack at sixty-eight.
It was a Tuesday.
It was not expected.
He had been healthy, or appeared to be, and the heart attack was the kind that gives no warning, that arrives fully formed and complete, and the ambulance came and the paramedics did what paramedics do and it was not enough and he was gone by the time I reached the hospital.
Three years.
In those three years I had made his world very small.
Not consciously.
By the accumulation of small choices.
Not going to the places we had gone together because they were the places we had gone together.
Not traveling because travel had been something we planned together and now there was no planning together.
Not doing the things I wanted to do because the wanting itself felt wrong, felt like a betrayal of the shape of the life I had lost.
I had become, without meaning to, the librarian who had retired to her house and who had weekly lunches with her daughter and calls with her son and a garden she was not tending and a world that was the size of Maple Grove Lane.
After Clara left that Sunday, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
I thought about her question.
I thought about it the way I had thought about books when I was a librarian, not looking for the answer directly but looking for the shape of the question.
When was the last time you did something just because it made you happy.
Not because it was practical.
Not because it was safe.
Not because you knew exactly what you were getting into.
Just because it made you happy.
I went to my computer.
I had seen a photograph of Malta once, years ago, in a travel magazine that had been in a waiting room.
I had thought: someday.
I had never gone back to the thought.
I went to a travel website.
I looked at photographs of Valletta, of the harbor, of the old stone streets, of the particular blue of the Mediterranean.
I found a departure date.
I entered my credit card number.
I did not let myself think too carefully.
I booked the ticket.
Then I made a promise.
Just to myself, in the kitchen on Maple Grove Lane on a Sunday evening in March.
I said: for one week, I will say yes.
Yes to unfamiliar food.
Yes to conversations with strangers.
Yes to whatever presents itself.
Yes to being surprised.
Yes to life.
I had not said yes to anything unexpected in three years.
It was time to try.
I arrived in Malta on a Wednesday morning at the end of April.
The flight was seven hours and I slept for approximately two of them and for the rest I looked at the clouds and thought about the specific strangeness of being sixty-seven and doing something for the first time.
The hotel was in Valletta, which is the capital, a small fortified city on a peninsula surrounded by harbors, built by knights in the sixteenth century and still carrying that history in its stones.
I had read about it.
I am a librarian.
I am always reading about things.
But reading about a place and being in it are different in the way that reading about warmth and feeling the sun on your face are different.
The warmth was real.
The light was real.
The specific smell of old stone and sea air and the narrow streets where everyone walked because the streets were too narrow for cars was real in a way that photographs had not prepared me for.
I went to sleep that first night with the window open.
On the second day I got lost.
I had a map.
The map was not helping.
I had been walking for forty minutes trying to find a specific church that my guidebook described as essential and I had turned around twice and I was holding the map in a way that I eventually understood was upside down.
I was standing at an intersection trying to reorient the map when I heard someone laugh.
Not unkindly.
Warmly.
I looked up.
A man was standing to my left.
He was approximately my age, perhaps a few years older, with gray hair and the kind of face that accumulates expressions rather than hiding them, a face that looked like it had laughed a great deal.
He said: first time in Malta?
I said: is it that obvious?
He said: only because I did the exact same thing with my map my first day here.
He said: I’m David.
I said: Margaret.
He said: the church you’re looking for is two streets to the left and then right at the pharmacy with the blue awning.
He said: or you could let me show you, since I’m heading that direction anyway.
I thought about the promise.
Yes to conversations with strangers.
I said: all right.
He was seventy years old.
He had been an architect.
He was from Edinburgh, which explained the slight accent I had not immediately placed.
He had a wife who had died four years ago.
Her name was Moira.
He told me about her in the easy way of someone who has processed their grief enough that speaking about the person they lost is not painful in the acute sense but is simply the truth of who they are.
He said: she was the one who always wanted to travel.
He said: when she got sick, she made me promise I would do the trips we had planned together.
He said: so I’m doing them.
I said: that’s a beautiful thing to do.
He said: it’s harder than I expected.
He said: because every place that’s beautiful, I think about how she would have loved it.
He said: but then I decide that the loving of it, even without her, is something she would have wanted.
We found the church.
We had coffee in a small bar around the corner from it.
He was effortlessly funny in the specific way of people who find the world genuinely amusing and who can convey that amusement without needing to perform it.
He told a story about getting on the wrong bus that involved two wrong buses and a goat and took fifteen minutes to tell and had me laughing in a way I had not laughed in some time.
By sunset we had been talking for three hours.
The next morning he knocked on the door of the hotel restaurant while I was having breakfast alone and said: room for one more?
I said: yes.
The day after that he suggested a ferry to Gozo, the smaller island north of Malta, for the day.
I said: yes.
On Gozo there was an ancient stone temple that predated Stonehenge and that sat on a headland with the sea on two sides and a quality of antiquity that made you feel, standing in it, that being alive in any century was a specific privilege.
David said: does it bother you, being around very old things?
I said: no. Why?
He said: some people find it disorienting. All those people who stood here thousands of years ago and are completely gone.
He said: I find it comforting. All those people who stood here and managed to build something that lasted. The building lasted even if they didn’t.
I said: maybe that’s what we’re all trying to do.
He said: build something that lasts.
I said: yes.
He said: I think so.
We took the ferry back in the evening.
On the boat I watched the sun on the water and I thought about Robert.
Not with the specific grief that had characterized the past three years.
With the specific gratitude of someone who has been reminded that having loved is not a reason to stop living.
David said, watching the water: you thinking about your husband?
I said: yes. How did you know?
He said: you had the look.
I said: what look.
He said: the one where you’re here and also somewhere else.
He said: I recognize it because I have it too.
I said: does it go away?
He said: I don’t think so. I think it just changes.
He said: it becomes less like a wound and more like a room you can visit.
He said: you can go there and feel what’s there and then come back.
I said: I’ve been in the room for three years.
He said: yes.
He said: I know.
He said: the ferry is also a room.
I said: a different one.
He said: yes. A different one. Both can be true.
I looked at him.
I said: how did you get to be so wise about grief?
He said: Moira.
He said: she died slowly. Over two years.
He said: and we talked about it, the whole time. Everything.
He said: she refused to not talk about it.
He said: she said: David, I need you to be able to live after I’m gone and the only way you’re going to be able to do that is if we say everything now.
He said: so we said everything.
He said: and then she went.
He said: and I was devastated.
He said: and also, I knew exactly what she wanted me to do.
He said: which was this.
He gestured at the water, the boat, the evening.
I said: I’m glad she told you.
He said: so am I.
By the end of the week I had forgotten what the first day of loneliness had felt like.
I do not mean that loneliness was gone.
I mean that the daily background presence of it had lifted, the way a noise you have stopped hearing becomes audible again only in its absence.
I had been lonely for three years and I had not known how loud the loneliness was until it was quiet.
One evening we sat by the sea on a bench near the Lower Barakka Gardens and watched the boats in the Grand Harbour and David said: I’m really glad you said yes.
I said: to what?
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