It took nine days to organise and I did all of it on my phone in a stock room at work.
The hardest part was the ring, which sounds absurd and which is true. You cannot buy a wedding ring quickly without it looking like a wedding ring you bought quickly.
I found one in the end for eighteen pounds and it is the single best money I have ever spent, and it is buried with her, and I did not put that in the post either.
On the day, she had one of those rare bursts of energy that people in that building get and that nobody can explain properly.
She was able to stand. Right beside me, absolutely radiant.
There is one detail about that afternoon that nobody has ever asked me about and that I now understand completely.
She asked what I was wearing.
Two days before, out of nothing, in the middle of something else: what will you have on?
And I said I had not thought about it, and she said — very lightly — that navy photographs well.
I wore navy. Of course I did.
She dressed the photograph. She dressed both of us, eleven weeks out, from a bed, and she did it in eight words.
And she held her hand up to the camera to show off the ring.
For that one afternoon she was not a patient.
She was a beautiful, happy bride, and there are nine photographs and in eight of them she is looking straight down the lens.
PART 2
She passed peacefully a few weeks later.
Eleven days after that photograph went up, and about four hundred thousand people had seen it by then.
I did not tell her that.
Not once, in eleven days, in about nine visits.
And I have gone back and forth on whether she ever knew, and I have landed on yes.
Because on the Friday — four days after I posted it — a nurse called Bettine mentioned, in passing, that Wilhelmina had asked her that morning whether people had liked the photographs.
Whether people had liked them. Plural. To a nurse, and not to me.
She knew I had posted it. She knew within four days. And she asked somebody else, because asking me would have made it a thing between us, and then it would have stopped being mine and started being hers.
I had been told the funeral would be very small.
She had no family. That is what the hospice had on file, and it is what she had told me herself, and there was a line in her notes about next of kin that was simply blank.
So I expected me, and a few of the nurses, under a grey sky.
It was not small.
There were more than twenty people at that graveside. Three of them were nurses.
The rest were strangers.
A woman from two counties away who had driven three hours. A man in his sixties who did not speak to anybody. Two young women who stood at the back and left before it finished.
Somebody had brought flowers with a card on them from a florist in a town I have never been to.
That is the detail I keep. Not the phones.
A person somewhere ordered flowers, by phone, for the funeral of a woman they had seen in a photograph on an afternoon in October, and paid a delivery charge, and wrote a card.
I have not been able to find out who and I have stopped trying.
And at least four of them were holding up phones.
They were there because of the photograph.
Because I had posted it.
I stood on that grass in a black coat and watched about twenty people attend the funeral of somebody they had never met.
And what I felt, standing there, was proud.
That is the truth and it lasted about four minutes and I have had two years to look at it.
I looked at a graveside with twenty people at it and I thought: I did that. She would have been so pleased.
