Loose wrinkles covered the backs of his hands. Karen rubbed her thumb over them, watching the skin stretch and then pull back again. All the veins that she'd memorized into a map in her head. Over the years, she'd watch as the wrinkles became deeper, and the skin became more slack, and the veins became more prominent. She and John would sit up at night sometimes just looking at each others hands.
Karen tenderly ran her hands over his fingernails. They were still sharp at the edges from where she clipped them for him last night. She turned his hand over and looked at his wrinkled palm. Partly in reflex, partly in loneliness, she slipped her hand over his and grabbed on tight. The slightly warm bump of their wedding ring pressed into the bones of her fingers.
A deluge of memories flooded through her mind, sweeping out everything but him, and Karen was numb. She felt the grief hovering above her, looming and groaning with the entirety of its weight, threatening to collapse. She felt she would not survive it. She had lived many years already, and spent more years of her life with John than she had been without him.
She thought of their first years. John had started out taking her to fancy dinner dates, and it wasn't long before they got tired of playing dress up and would just go to the local cafes with some books to spend the day. Picnicking at the beach, watching seagulls, and getting into some petty argument about whether a cat or a dog was a better pet. Karen liked cats and John was vehemently against them. And then, for Karen's birthday, John bought her a kitten. They named her Mittens, but he always liked to call her 'Little Shit'. The first time they had talked about getting married. John had brought it up first, but Karen had been waiting for it. The feeling of homeness when they realized they both saw the same future together.
Their wedding, which was a stressful affair with their family and friends, and how both of them went to their new home and collapsed laughing out of the exhaustion and pure ridiculousness of dealing with each others in-laws.
The birth of Katherine, their first child. The look on John's face when he cradled his daughter for the first time; Karen fell in love with him all over again when she saw the glistening his eyes. The year that John had lost his job, how much weight he lost pretending that he wasn't 'that hungry' just so his wife and child had enough to eat. How much John cried when Mittens passed away, and how much he cried again when Karen brought home their second cat, Munchkin. When John finally scored a new job, and how wonderful his boss and all of his coworkers turned out to be. The birth of their second child, Paul, who turned out to look almost exactly like his father. John's first heart attack, and the careful painstaking recovery from there. The way John would complain about all the vegetables and fruits that Karen would make, calling it 'rabbit food', but he knew it was good for him and would still compliment her cooking every single night.
And on, and on, and on. They didn't travel a lot, nor did they meet lots of famous people, or have particularly glamorous jobs. Their lives were fairly average, but their life had been their adventure. Karen knew all the hairs on John's face, every pimple on his body, and every wrinkle on his hands. He was her best friend, and as long as he had been in her life, John had always been her best friend. In her memory, he had always been a vivacious, curious, kind and silly man who knew how to crack any joke at the right time. They were two candles, constantly keeping each other lit, fighting through any draft. Towards the end, they knew that one of them had to go first. John always joked, 'I'll go first, to set up camp before you get there.' And Karen would scold him terribly for it and then squeeze his hand until she felt better.
Finally, the time had come. John had left to set up camp. Their time together was over, at least for whatever time Karen had remaining. The warmth of John's personality, the one who had been beside her for however many decades, had departed. The deep numb emptiness in Karen had barely begun to register as she looked down at the worn ring on John's hand. She spoke, and her voice always came out sounding older than she'd expect it to:
'John, you are the best thing that has ever happened to me.'