Every morning, on my way to work, I would pass the same homeless man sitting outside my subway station.
His name was Larry.
He was calm, polite and never bothered anyone. During the two years I had seen him there, we had developed our own little routine. I stopped and gave him a black coffee, and we exchanged a few words about the weather before I went to the office.
So, on an icy Tuesday in the morning, something was different.
Larry wasn't reaching out for the change.
Instead, he held a piece of cardboard.
The message written through him made me stop on my way.
“Marry me. I only have one month to live.”
For illustrative purposes only
I looked at the words, then Larry.
“Larry, what is this?”
I knelt down next to him and gave him his usual coffee.
It looked worse than I had seen it. His face was unusually pale, and his hands shook badly as he wrapped them around the hot cup.
“The clinic gave me a month,” he whispered, keeping his eyes fixed on the pavement.
“A month?”
He nodded.
“Failure of the liver.”
My heart sank.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I didn't know what else to say.
Then I looked at the cardboard again.
“But... the marriage?”
Larry breathed tremblingly.
“I don’t want to die like John Doe, Sarah.”
His voice broke.
“I want to belong to someone. At least on paper.”
He looked at me, his eyes full of tears.
“I want someone to claim my ashes when the city tries to put me in an unmarked grave.”
I couldn't talk.
Maybe he was too empathetic.
Maybe I just couldn’t get away from someone who was asking for such a small thing at the end of their life.
I was single. I had no husband, no children, no reason to complicate my life.
So I said yes.
Two days later, Larry and I stood inside the city courthouse and signed the marriage papers.
There was no wedding.
There is no celebration.
There are no romantic promises.
It was not a real marriage in the way people normally understood marriage.
It was simply a legal agreement that would allow a dying man to leave this world with a certain dignity.
Three weeks later, Larry died at a state hospice facility.
I was quietly grieving.
Then yesterday, I checked my mail.
Among the usual envelopes was a thick package addressed to me.
The postage stamp was dated one day before Larry's death.
I sat at my kitchen table and opened it.
Inside were several handwritten pages.
I smiled sadly.
I figured it was going to be a final thank you.
Maybe a few words about coffee.
Maybe something about how grateful he was that he would have agreed to help him.
But as I read the first sentences, my smile disappeared.
Then my hands started shaking.
When I got to the end of the first page, all the color had drained from my face.
Because Larry hadn't written the letter to thank me for marrying him.
I had written it because there was something I needed him to know.
Something that made me realize the man I had thought I was helping was hiding a much bigger secret than I could have imagined.
“Sarah, I need to apologize before I thank you.”
I read the first sentence twice.
My hands were already shaking when I got to the next line.
“No one was going to bury me like a John Doe.”
