After forty years of marriage, I believed there was almost nothing about my husband I didn’t know.

Then Frank died while visiting his daughter overseas, and when his ashes finally came back to me, something hidden inside the urn made me question everything about his last days.

After four decades together, I had always imagined that when Frank died, I would be beside him, holding his hand through the final goodbye.

Instead, I learned I had lost him through a phone call from thousands of miles away.

Frank had traveled abroad to stay with Claire, his daughter from his first marriage. Their relationship had been distant and difficult for years, but recently something had changed. They were speaking almost every week, slowly rebuilding what had once been broken.

When he told me he wanted to spend three weeks with her, I encouraged him to go.

“You should,” I said. “You’ve already wasted too many years missing each other.”