A Letter to be Opened at the Event of my Death

The best part of Time Traveler's Wife that they left out..

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through my labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more destiny in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

   I hate to think of you waiting. I know that you have been for me all your life, always uncertain of how long this patch of waiting would be. Ten minutes, ten days. A month. What an uncertain husband I have been Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus alone and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a plaything of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. Of me--put me deep inside of you and then go out in the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element. I have given you a life of suspended animation. I don't mean to say that you have done nothing. You have created beauty and meaning, in your art, and Alba, who is amazing, and for me: for me you have been everything.
   After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerver, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vison of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes but only with my imagination, that makes pictures and always wanted to paint you shining; but I hope that vision will be true anyway.
   Clare, there is one last thing, and I have hesitated to tell you, because I'm superstitiously afraid that telling might cause it to not happen (I know: silly) and also because I have just been going on about not waiting and this might cause you to wait longer than you have ever before. But I will tell you in case you need something, after.
   Last sumer, I was sitting in Kendrick's waiting room when I suddenly found myself in a dark hallway in a  house I don't know. I was sort of tangled up in a bunch of galoshes, and it smelled like rain. At the end of the halll I could see a rim of light around a door, ans so I went very slowly and very quietly to the door and looked in. The room was white, and intensely lit with morning sun. At the window, with her back to me, sat a woman, wearing a coral-colored cardigan sweater, with long wite hair all down her back. She had a cup of tea beside her, on a table. I must have made some little noise or she sensed me behind her... she turned and saw me, and I saw her, and it was you. Clare, this was you as an old woman, in the future. It was sweet, Clare, it was beyond telling, to come as though from death to hold you, and to see the years all presen in your face. I won't tell you any more, so you can imagine it, so you can have it unrehearsed when the time comes, as it will, as it does come. We will see each other agian, Clare. Until then, live, fully, present in the world, which is so beautiful.
   It's dark, now, and I am very tires. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

Henry