It’s been nearly five years. I want to sit with him. I want to be close to him. I want to do all this with no (Casey) questions asked.

Once I hear my roommate steadily snoring for five minutes, I peel my covers off and tiptoe out of my room using the flashlight on my phone for guidance. I make my way über-quietly to the kitchen and sit cross-legged on the floor next to the box, peel back the flaps of the cardboard for the second time tonight, and pause. It’s been a while since Decker and I were in the same room and I’m not really sure how to act around him.

I pick up the glassy ceramic urn and it is cold to the touch. It’s not a traditional-looking “urn,” this shiny, grayish-blue jar that his mom picked out from an artist from Argentina. As I shift it from one hand to the other and give it a three-sixty, it dawns on me that maybe another wealthy woman purchased this same ceramic art and is using it as a dog treat container in Bel Air. Crazy how what’s one woman’s urn is another woman’s cookie jar.

“Hi,” I whisper.

And that’s when they hit again, the tears.

I miss him. I’ve always missed him.

I miss our life together. I miss watching him scramble to do his taxes the night before they were due because he insisted that paying an accountant to do them was a waste of money even though he wasn’t good at math. I miss us taking turns throwing Leno’s tennis ball for an hour at the park while sipping rosé on a grass-stained blanket that smelled like mold no matter how many times we washed it. I miss grilling grocery store butcher counter steaks to a perfect medium rare and talking about how our neighbor two doors down might actually be a high-end hooker. I miss so much about my life back then, my old life.

I can’t help but draw my finger—fresh paper cut and all—to the urn’s inscription and run it lightly back and forth, feeling the shape of each and every letter.

Debbie facilitated the cremation. That’s what she said he wanted. So Debbie picked the mausoleum. And Debbie ordered the custom urn. But I got to choose what this little nameplate was going to have on it. This was my part of the process to own.

I was shocked that Debbie came to me, albeit in an email, for my buy-in. I was simply told it needed to be under thirty characters per line, three lines max.

I don’t know why she outsourced this task to me. Maybe her conscience couldn’t possibly be okay with her not consulting his wife on at least one thing on the list of death to-dos. But instead of dissecting the semantics, I decided to reply to her email as quickly as possible so I could delete it out of my inbox just as swiftly as it had pinged in. Short and sweet, just like our marriage, is what I went with: Decker’s full name, his date of birth, and the date he died. While it may not have been the most colorful arrangement of words, at least it fell well within the character limit, unlike my other idea—THIS NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED.