The homeless man I married always drank his coffee black outside my subway station in downtown Minneapolis.
Six days after his funeral, a letter arrived in his shaky handwriting inside a thick white envelope.
The postmark was dated one day before he died, and the first sentence was an apology I did not understand at all.
“Hannah, I need to apologize before I thank you,” I read aloud to the empty room, tracing the uneven letters I had watched him write on hospice intake forms.
When I first held the envelope, I had actually smiled because I assumed he was leaving me a quiet goodbye.
He was the kind of man who could never accept a paper cup of coffee without thanking me three times.
Then I reached the second sentence, and my smile instantly disappeared.
“Nobody was going to bury me as a John Doe,” he had written on the lined yellow paper.
I sat down heavily in my armchair, staring at the page while my breath caught in my throat.
Less than a month earlier, he had been sitting outside the Hennepin Avenue station with a piece of cardboard across his knees.
Written across it in large black marker were the words: MARRY ME. I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.
I had known him for nearly two years by then, stopping every weekday morning at the coffee cart beside the entrance.
My cup always had sweet cream, while his was strictly black without any sugar.
He never begged me for spare change or food.
Some mornings we talked about the incoming Midwest blizzards, and other mornings he complained about the city pigeons.
Once, he looked down at my office pumps and said, “Those look like they were designed by an engineer who genuinely hated human feet.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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