The funeral home allowed me a private hour with him before the viewing. As I gently brushed his hair back the way I had done countless times throughout our life together, something caught my attention. His hair had been trimmed shorter than he had ever worn it.
That’s when I noticed it — just beneath the hairline above his right ear.
A small, faded tattoo.
The ink looked old, softened and slightly blurred with time. It clearly wasn’t new. Under his thinning gray hair, now cut too short to hide it, were numbers — two sets separated by decimal points.
Coordinates.
Thomas had never had tattoos. Not once in forty-two years of marriage.
Before the funeral director came back, I quietly pulled out my phone and took a quick photo.
Later that evening, after the burial, when the house had finally grown quiet and the last of the sympathy casseroles had been dropped off, I opened the picture again and entered the numbers into my GPS.
