After a week of nonstop tears, by the time we arrived at the church for my father Daniel’s funeral, I felt numb. The grief had hollowed me out.
The service was quiet—organ music, whispered prayers, my mother composed but pale beside me. Then, the church doors opened.
An elderly woman in a white wedding dress walked in.
Not a costume, but a modest, elegant gown. She walked straight to my father’s casket, placed a gloved hand on it, and whispered, “You finally got to see me in white, Daniel.”
The room froze.
Then she spoke to all of us. Her name was Ellen. Fifty years ago, she fell in love with my father at prom. Two weeks later, he was drafted. They wrote letters. They planned a life. Then her letters went unanswered, and a telegram arrived: Daniel had been killed in Vietnam.
She mourned him. Refused to marry. Kept his letters in a box and a wedding dress in storage, waiting for a promise he’d once made: that he’d see her in white one day.
But ten years later, she saw him—in a grocery store, alive, with a wife and child. A clerical error had mistakenly listed him as dead. He never knew she’d grieved him. And she never told him she’d seen him.
So she stayed silent. Kept her promise in her heart.
Until today.
My mother rose, walked to Ellen, and took her hand. “I knew about you,” she said softly. “He told me once. You were part of who he was.”
They embraced—two women, both bound by love for the same man in different times.
Later, I thanked Ellen. She had loved my father when he was young. She gave us a part of him we never knew.
That night, I sat on the porch with Mom. She brought tea and raspberry tarts. We talked about Dad, about love, and about Ellen.
“Love doesn’t just disappear,” she said. “It waits—in memories, in promises, in the quiet spaces between goodbye and forever.”
And in that moment, I didn’t just say goodbye to my father. I met him again—through the girl he once loved, and the woman who never stopped waiting.
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