I used to tick the ‘single’ box on forms interested in my marital status. This was the truth. It was also true that I had two husbands. I acquired both of them at birth, though I met one of them posthumously. I loved and continue to love different things about my two husbands. I loved my living husband's particular brand of craziness. His chronic political incorrectness is in a class of its own, even by the standards of older Black people, who often dispense with common politeness as they age, and say and do as they please. In his 90s, my husband's offside thoughts and utterances were second only to his belief in hard work as a moral principle. Yet that sharp tongue, caustic wit and immodest swearing is a deceptive shell of toughness, beneath which lies the gentlest, most generous old man who has ever loved me.

But if my cantankerous husband taught me to look forward to that age when I could flout all social expectations of politeness, my posthumous husband taught me something even more precious: he showed me a different face of death. Before meeting him, death meant a confusing mix of grief, adults’ tears and their insistence that good children went to heaven and enjoyed all those impossibly fresh fruits – some of whose names I didn't know – and played with cute lion cubs and lambs on green gardens beside fresh blue streams, as The Watchtower magazines promised. True, I longed for those perfect fruits. Somehow, the juicy passion fruits and creamy avocados from our garden looked apologetic beside these Jehovah's Witness fruit baskets. And yes, I wanted nothing more than to play with those lion cubs as I dipped my feet into those infinitely blue streams. Still, I remained unswayed by this version of the hereafter. Even at that tender age, I had soaked up the spiritual arrogance that marked the Catholic children of my parish. We knew we were the chosen ones. And instinctively, we considered these Watchtower heavens a little too syrupy.

But my late husband introduced me to a different face of death. He had been laid to rest under a smooth gravestone, right in front of his house, that bore his name and date of death. With that gravestone, he taught me a lot about death.