I married my first love after 45 years apart to fulfill her dying wish
I married my first love after 45 years apart to fulfill her dying wish — after she died, her son handed me an envelope and said, "You don't know the whole truth about Mom. She left this for you."
I preached on this in the April. Twelve minutes, on a Sunday, to about ninety people.
This is what I should have said instead, and I am writing it down because I am not sure I am ever going to.
I pastor at Pine Hollow and two or three times a week I go up to Mercy Ridge and sit with people who are not going home.
In the March they told me there was somebody new in. A woman, stage four.
I went up on the Tuesday and walked into that room and my heart about stopped.
It was Bonnie.
The girl I was in love with at seventeen. The girl I took to prom in 1981. We went to different colleges and somehow that was forty-five years.
"Bonnie?"
She looked up and squinted at me and then she laughed out loud.
"Well. Tommy Pruitt. That is not possible."
After that I went every day.
We talked for hours about nothing. She had lines in both arms and she was still funnier than me, which she always was.
Then one afternoon she told me they had given her a week.
I could not get a word out.
She took hold of my hand.
"Don't pull that face. You promised to marry me when we were seventeen, Tommy."
I nodded.
"You're forty-five years late. Shall we get it done?"
I laughed with tears coming down.
"Bonnie. You want to get married?"
"I do. It'd mean everything to me. I know how it sounds. Would you do it?"
I said yes.
Three days later we were married in that room. I wore my church suit because it is the only one I have, and I got two plain bands off a table at the Saturday market.
Hers had a little pink heart on it because there was almost nothing to pick from. She laughed until she had to stop and said it was the best ring she had ever owned.
Five days later she was gone.
After the service, Wes came and found me outside and he had an envelope.
"There's something you need to know about Mom. She wanted you to have this after."
I opened it and read the first line and my legs went.
THE FIRST LINE.
***Tommy, I've been coming to your church since 2014.***
ELEVEN YEARS.
She moved back to Wakeford in the October of 2014, after her husband went, and she has been in my building nearly every Sunday since.
Back pew, left-hand side, by the radiator.
She says in the letter she sat there because the light is bad at that end and because you can get out quick.
Eleven years. Call it four hundred and fifty Sundays, allowing for winters and the two years she was bad.
I stood at that door and shook hands at the end of every single one of them.
WHY SHE NEVER SAID.
She gives three reasons and I have read them more times than is good for me.
The first is that she came the first time to see what had become of me and then it got awkward to say.
The second is Ruth. My wife was alive until the November of 2018 and Bonnie writes that she was not going to be a woman introducing herself to a pastor's wife as his old girlfriend.
The third one is four words long and it is the one that has me up at night.
***And then you looked right through me.***
THE HANDSHAKE.
She dates it. The eleventh of June, 2017.
She stayed back after the service and waited until the line was nearly done and she came up and took my hand and said: "That was a good one this morning."
I said: "Well, thank you. Good to see you."
Then I turned to the Hallorans behind her.
That is it. That is the whole of it.
She writes that she went out to the parking lot and sat in her car for twenty minutes and then drove home and did not come back for a month.
WHAT I DID WITH THAT HANDSHAKE.
Nothing, because I have no memory of it at all.
I have tried. I have sat in that sanctuary on a Tuesday with the lights off trying to get June 2017 back and there is nothing there.
That is not a defence. It is the opposite of one.
A woman I had promised to marry at seventeen stood in front of me and said something kind and I gave her the line I give everybody, and it did not register enough to leave a mark.
I have shaken about forty thousand hands at that door. I am good at it. People say so.
THE FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY SUNDAYS, AND WHAT I ACTUALLY SAW.
I have been at that door since 2009 and I know that room.
I can tell you who sits where. The Hallorans, third row. Ivor Cobbett on the aisle because of his hip. The Minnick family take up most of the fifth.
Back pew, left side, by the radiator.
I know that seat. I know it was taken.
In the September I made myself sit down and work out what I had in my head for that woman before the March of this year, and the honest answer is a shape.
A lady on her own at the back. Grey, glasses, usually a green coat in the winter. Always on time, always out quick.
I had a category for her. We all have them in that job and we do not say so.
She was one of the quiet ones who do not want fussing over.
Eleven years, and that is the whole of what I had: a woman who did not want fussing over, which is the single most convenient thing a pastor can decide about somebody.
WHAT I PREACHED IN THE APRIL.
Twelve minutes. I called it The Long Way Round.
It is the best thing I have ever done from that pulpit and I knew it while I was doing it.
The hospital room. The squint. The pink heart on the ring. Five days.
I did not use the envelope. I had had it eleven days by then and I did not use one word of it.
I told ninety people that God had brought an old friend back to me at the end of her life.
She had been in the fourth row from the back of that room for eleven years.
RUTH.
My wife went in the November of 2018 and I have left her out of nearly all of this, which tells you something.
Bonnie was at that funeral. She says so in the letter, in one line, with no weight on it.
In the September I got the book out. We keep a record of who comes to a funeral, because people want the list afterwards.
B. Fisk is on it, third name in the second column.
Loretta's writing, taken at the door.
So in the November of 2018, a woman I had loved at seventeen stood at the back of my church while I buried my wife, and then carried a dish into the hall, and then went home.
In the March of this year she let me tell her, over about three days in a hospital room, all about Ruth and the last six months and what it had been like.
She asked me questions. Good ones. She let me talk for hours about a funeral she had been at.
THE RECORD.
Here is the part that finished me, and it took until the July to find it.
Bonnie Fisk gave to that church.
Not much. Twenty dollars a week in an envelope, which is what people do, and her name is written on the front of every one in her own hand.
Those go in a ledger. Loretta does the ledger and I sign it off at the end of every month, because that is how we do things and because I have always been careful about money.
I went into that office in the July and pulled the books.
B. FISK. Eleven years of it.
My signature is at the bottom of every page.
A hundred and thirty-two months of me putting my name under hers.
WHAT LORETTA SAID.
Loretta Mabry is seventy and she has run that office since before I came.
I asked her, in the July, whether she had known Bonnie.
She said: "Bonnie by the radiator? Course I did."
She said they talked most weeks. Flowers, the winter, Loretta's hip.
Then she said: "She asked me about you once."
I said what did she ask.
Loretta said: "Whether you were happy. After Ruth."
That was in about 2019, she thinks. She told Bonnie I was doing all right.
Then Loretta said the thing I have not been able to put down.
She said: "I'd have told you if I'd known, Dale. She never said she knew you. She just asked after you like anybody would."
WHAT THE REST OF THE LETTER SAYS.
It is two sides and it is not sad. That is Bonnie all over.
There is a paragraph about a sermon I did in 2021 that she did not agree with, and she tells me exactly why, and she is right.
There is a line about Ruth's funeral, which she was at. She was in that building the day I buried my wife and she carried a dish to the hall afterwards like everybody else.
Near the bottom she writes: Don't go tearing yourself up about the eleven years. I had eleven years of listening to you every Sunday. You had nothing. That's not your fault, it's just how it worked out.
***It's just how it worked out.***
That is a woman with four weeks left letting her old boyfriend off.
THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES IN THAT ROOM.
***Well. Tommy Pruitt. That is not possible.***
I have given that line about thirty times since the March, in the pulpit and out of it, and I have always done her voice.
She was not surprised.
I have been over those five minutes until there is nothing left of them and the thing I keep arriving at is the squint.
She squinted at me and then she laughed. That is what I remember and that is what I have been telling people, and it is a performance of working out who somebody is.
Bonnie Fisk had been looking at my face from the back of a room for eleven years. She did not need to squint at me across nine feet of hospital.
And she knew I was coming. Mercy Ridge tells the chaplaincy list who is in, and the Pine Hollow minister comes Tuesdays and Thursdays, and everybody on that ward knows it.
She had two days' notice at least.
So the woman gave me an entrance. She let me be the one who found her, because she had worked out in about four seconds that it would be easier for me that way.
She was doing me a kindness in the first five minutes and I have been retelling it as a miracle.
WHY SHE ASKED ME TO MARRY HER.
She does not say.
Two sides and she goes nowhere near it, which I did not notice for about a month because I was busy with the eleven years.
I asked Wes in the August.
He thought about it a long while. He is thirty-eight and he is careful, like she was.
He said: "I think she wanted one thing where she wasn't the one sitting at the back."
THE WEDDING, AND WHO WAS IN THAT ROOM.
Nine of us. Wes, two of the nurses, the ward sister, a chaplain colleague of mine called Owen who did it, and Bonnie's friend Dot from her street.
Dot drove herself. She is seventy-six.
I did not invite one person from Pine Hollow.
That has been bothering me since about the June and I made myself get to the bottom of it in the August.
It was not discretion. I have told myself it was, and it was not.
If Loretta Mabry had walked into that room on the twentieth of March, she would have said Bonnie? — and the whole eleven years would have come out standing up, four days before the woman died.
I did not know that at the time. I could not have known it.
But I knew enough to keep my own congregation away from my own wedding, and I did not examine why, and if you had asked me on the day I would have said it was to keep it simple for her.
She would have liked Loretta there. Those two talked most weeks for eleven years.
WHAT WES KNEW.
All of it, since about 2015.
He lives at Carrow Bend, which is forty minutes, and he came over most months and she talked about the church and she talked about me.
He has known my name since he was twenty-seven years old.
I asked him why he never said anything, at the hospital, in those three weeks.
He said: "She asked me not to."
Then he said: "And honestly, Tom? I was watching her be happy. I wasn't going to be the one who stopped it."
He handed me that envelope on the church steps twelve days after she went, because that is what she told him to do, and he has been straight with me about everything since.
WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE SERMON, WHICH IS NOT WHAT YOU WOULD THINK.
It is not that I left things out. Twelve minutes is twelve minutes and you leave almost everything out.
It is what I put in.
I told ninety people that God had brought an old friend back to me at the end of her life.
That sentence has me at the centre of it. God did a thing and the thing arrived at me.
What actually happened is that a woman moved towns in 2014 and chose a building and sat in it for eleven years and then got ill, and I walked in on a Tuesday because Tuesday is when I go.
There is no arranging in that. There is a woman making a decision over and over for eleven years and a man keeping a schedule.
When I read that sermon back in the July I counted the pronouns, which is a thing I tell young preachers to do.
Fifty-one of them are I or me.
Eleven are her.
THE THREE WEEKS.
Here is what I have had to look at, and it is worse than the handshake.
I went to that room every day for three weeks and we talked for hours.
I have described those conversations from the pulpit as the two of us remembering.
I did the talking.
I have gone back over it as honestly as I know how and I cannot produce more than about four things she told me about her own life in twenty-one days.
She was widowed. She had Wes. She had been a dental nurse. She had lived in Ohio.
That is it. That is everything I learned about forty-five years of a woman.
She knew my wife's name, my knee, the thing with the roof at Pine Hollow, and how I take my coffee, and I thought that was the two of us catching up.
She had eleven years of material and I had a handshake I cannot remember.
1981, AND WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING ABOUT IT.
I have told that hospital room, and ninety people, and a woman from the Baptist church at Linder, that Bonnie and I went to different colleges and that life happened.
That is a nice flat way of putting it and it is not what happened.
I stopped writing.
She wrote to me at Keswick State through the whole of that first autumn. I have no idea how many; I would say one a fortnight, and I answered the first three.
Then there was a girl called Ruth Enright in my second semester, and I did not answer the rest, and I did not tell Bonnie Fisk there was anybody.
I just stopped.
That is a thing an eighteen-year-old does and I am not going to flog myself over 1981.
What I will say is this.
I have spent seven months being staggered that a woman sat at the back of my church for eleven years without saying anything to me.
I was the one who taught her how that works.
I did it first, in 1981, over about four months, by letting letters go unanswered until they stopped coming.
WHAT I HAVE DONE SINCE.
I have not told the congregation. Seven months.
People still come up about that April sermon. A woman from the Baptist church over at Linder asked if she could use it.
I said yes.
So The Long Way Round has now been preached twice in this county, and it is a lovely story, and the only true thing in it is that we got married and she died.
THE RING.
I still have mine on. I have not worked out what to do about that either.
Wes has hers. I gave it to him at the hospital and he did not want to take it and I made him.
He told me in the August that she had it on a chain under her gown from the Thursday because her hands had swelled and she would not have it off.
WHAT I HAVE SAID TO GOD ABOUT IT, WHICH IS THE ONLY PART OF THIS I AM ANY GOOD AT.
Not much, and that is new for me.
For about four months I asked for the handshake back. That is what it amounts to. Eleven minutes a night, most nights, asking to be given one Sunday morning in June 2017 so that I could have it properly.
Then in the August I understood what I was actually doing, and I have more or less stopped.
I was not asking to be forgiven. I was asking to be let off the arithmetic.
Because if I could remember it — if I could produce one detail, her coat, the weather — then I would be a man who had a moment and missed it, which is a human thing that happens to everybody.
With nothing there, I am a man who did not have a moment at all. There was no near miss. She was simply not in my line of sight, for eleven years, by a kind of decision I made every Sunday without ever once making it.
That is the thing I have to take, and there is no asking it away.
WHAT THE CHURCH THINKS NOW.
Pine Hollow has about ninety on a Sunday and every one of them knows that story.
It has done something to that building that I did not expect and cannot undo.
Attendance is up. That is the plain fact of it and I am ashamed of how much I have enjoyed it.
Four new families since the April and two of them said the sermon, out loud, when I asked what had brought them.
In the June the deacons wanted to put a plaque in. A small one, by the back pew, for Bonnie.
I said no. I said it quickly and I said it twice and I could not give them a reason that made any sense.
Ivor Cobbett asked me straight out why not, and I said something about not wanting to make a shrine of a seat.
The real answer is that a plaque would go on the wall beside that radiator, and I would have to walk past it every Sunday for the rest of my working life, and some visitor would ask me what it was.
I would have to say she sat there and then stop, and that is the sentence I cannot get out.
DOT.
I went and found her in the September, at her house on Tanner Row, two doors down from where Bonnie lived.
She made me tea and talked for an hour and a half.
She knew everything. Of course she did.
She said Bonnie told her about me in about 2015, over a fence, the way those things get said.
Then she told me something that was not in the letter.
In the October of 2023, Bonnie very nearly wrote to me.
Dot read the draft. Two pages. It said who she was and that she had been coming to the church and that she thought it had gone on long enough.
She did not send it.
I asked Dot why not and she went quiet for a bit and then she said: "That was the autumn your boy was poorly, wasn't it."
It was. My son Reece was in Mercy Ridge for nine days in the October of 2023 and the whole church knew.
Bonnie put a two-page letter in a drawer because I had enough on.
WHAT WES ASKED ME IN THE OCTOBER.
He rings now, about once a fortnight, which I did not expect and which I am not going to question.
In the October he asked me whether I had read the letter to anybody.
I said no.
He said: "You should read it to your church, Tom."
I said I would think about it.
Then he said: "She didn't write it for you to keep in a drawer."
That is the second time somebody in that family has put something in a drawer in this account, and he did not mean it that way and I have not told him he said it.
I have had that envelope since the fourth of April.
Seven months, in the desk in my study, in the second drawer down, under the funeral folder.
Bonnie Fisk left a two-page letter in a drawer for two and a half years because I had enough on.
I have had hers in a drawer for seven months because I cannot work out how to come off well in it.
REECE.
My son is thirty-four and he lives at Linder and he was at that wedding in the sense that he knew about it afterwards.
He rang me in the May, after the sermon had got round, and he asked me a question nobody else has.
He said: "Dad. Did you love her, or did you just say yes?"
I told him both, which is the truth and which is also the easy shape of it.
He let that sit and then he said: "Because you said yes to Mom in about a week and all."
He did not mean anything by it. He was eleven when Ruth and I told him how we got engaged and he has repeated that story at two family parties since.
I said yes to Ruth Enright in nine days in 1982 and I said yes to Bonnie Fisk in about four seconds in 2026, and in between there is one woman I did not say anything to at all, for eleven years, standing by a radiator.
I have been calling it the yes that redeemed the whole thing.
It might just be that saying yes is the easiest thing I do.
THE LAST THING.
I went back through the attendance books in the September. We keep a visitors' sheet at the door and Loretta files them.
The October of 2014.
There is a line in it in Bonnie's writing — the same hand as the envelopes, the same hand as the letter — and it has her name and the box ticked for first-time visitor.
There is a column on that sheet headed Anything we can pray for?
Most people leave it blank.
She wrote four words in it on her first Sunday at my church, eleven years ago, and I would have read that sheet on the Monday morning because I read every one of them.
It says: That he's doing all right.
May you like
No name on it. No explanation. Just that, in the column, from a visitor nobody knew.
I read it in 2014 and I prayed for it, because that is what I do with that sheet, and I had no idea on God's earth who I was praying for.
