You think you’ve got it all figured out at sixty-eight.
The house echoes differently now that the kids have scattered about their lives—Portland, Denver, somewhere in Florida. Your wallet stays fuller longer. The mortgage payment that once loomed over you every month vanished three years ago, leaving behind a strange lightness.
Golf happened by accident. Dusty from next door needed a fourth, and suddenly, you’re spending Tuesday mornings chasing a small white ball across manicured grass, pretending to understand handicaps and loving every frustrating minute of it.
Today started perfectly. Cloudless sky, the temperature climbing toward a comfortable seventy-eight. Andi packed your usual—roast beef sandwich, apricot slices, and a thermos with dark coffee that stays hot until noon. Olive Garden reservations at six-thirty because she has a weakness for those endless breadsticks, and after forty-two years, her weaknesses have become your religion.
The ninth hole stretches before you, a gentle par three with a water hazard that’s claimed more balls than you care to count. You’re lining up your shot when the sweat starts—odd that since the morning air is still cool on your face.
Your chest tightens. Indigestion, maybe? Last night’s chili dog rebellion, complete with those jalapeños that Andi warned you about. You wave off Dusty’s concerned look and sink into the golf cart’s seat.
The vinyl reminds you of Andi’s old purse, the brown one she carried when you first worked up the courage to hold her hand outside the movie theater in 1982.
The world tilts slightly. Your phone feels impossibly heavy as you scroll to Andi’s number, muscle memory guiding fingers that suddenly seem clumsy.
“Hello?”
You still remember the place where you first heard her voice. Santa Monica Beach 1981, next to the lifeguard stand. You had invented three different reasons to walk past her spot before finally asking about the book she was reading. Cujo by Stephen King.
Her voice calms the raging sea inside of you. You think. Is it going to be alright?
“Andi” The pause stretches too long.
“Mike? What’s wrong?”
Everything and nothing. The pain spreads across your chest like spilled coffee, dark and insistent. “I don’t think I’m going to make dinner today.”
“What do you mean? Where are you?”
“I love you.”
The words come easier now than they did that first time, whispered into her hair while she slept on your futon mattress, dumped on the floor of your first apartment together. She still believes she said it first three days later over French toast, and you’ve never corrected her.
The phone slips from your hand. Andi’s voice grows distant, urgent, but the world is already pulling away like a tide in reverse. The golf course blurs into watercolor greens and blues, and suddenly, you’re everywhere at once—
That Italian restaurant where you both wore marinara sauce-like badges of honor.
Late at night at the hospital, when Katlynn arrived. She was impossibly small with a full head of hair, transforming you both into people you’d never been before.
Saturday mornings in comfy chairs with tea and coffee.
A fight over money, which didn’t even matter, leading to the best makeup sex of our lives.
Teaching Loyal to drive in the empty mall parking lot, both of you white-knuckled and laughing.
Ordinary Tuesdays.
Extraordinary Sundays.
The accumulation of a life lived fully, if not always perfectly.
The fear you expected never comes. Instead, there’s gratitude—profound and warm as sunlight, for Andi’s laugh. For children who have become adults, you actually like. Golf games and Olive Garden breadsticks and forty-two years of someone choosing you, again and again.
The darkness arrives gently, like sleep after a long day.
No more deadlines. No more worry. No more discussions on whether the lawn needs cutting.
Only a profound gratitude for the time you’ve had, the love you’ve shared, and the life you’ve built with the woman who means the most to you.
Andi’s voice saying your name.
What moments from your own life would flash before your eyes? Share in the comments below what memories you’d want to revisit, or tell us about a story that similarly moved you. Your reflections help create a community of shared human experience—we’d love to hear from you.
