Opinion | In Memory of My Husband, Dan

My husband, Dan Collins, died this month. It was because of Covid and pneumonia. By the time he passed, Dan had been sedated for a while, and there’s a small controversy between me and my sisters over what was said the last time he and I actually exchanged words. It was either “I love you” or Dan’s claim that he was the one who ordered cans of salmon and vegetable for our dog.

Either one seems good. One of the great joys of a long marriage is how the personal and pragmatic moosh together.

We married in 1970, when we were living in Amherst, graduate students studying government at the University of Massachusetts. Dan, who had been drafted right out of college, always said that he’d signed up for the program because it would mean an early release from a deeply boring job processing forms for the Army.

My conservative parents were thrilled when I was home for vacation and received a picture of my new boyfriend in uniform and carrying a rifle, taken while he was finishing up some final piece of duty. They became less euphoric when they read his inscription: “Pfc. Daniel Collins awaits the next infringement of his civil liberties.”

We lived together for a couple of years, and I agreed to become “Gail Collins” while we were still single because our postal worker refused to deliver mail to a man and woman at the same address with different names.

Dan got a reporting job at The Evening Sentinel, a paper in Ansonia, Conn. He proposed when I told him I was not following him to the Lower Naugatuck Valley unless we were married.