I always looked good in black.

She always said that, and she was right.

Of course that’s why blondes always wear black at funerals, baptisms, even weddings and at the Oscars. It works for white hair as well.

That’s a fact, and it could, at long last, be the deciding fact in what I decide to do with the last 10 years of my life.

Ten years. Yes, my doctor — the only doctor I’ve ever really had in my life — is retiring, along with two other of my doctors this year, leaving me to the fates.

During my last annual exam he told me I could plan on living to my 100th year. It’s common with the Irish to live that long, they say.

She, my Katherine — whose spirit sits across from me at the table each day, where I ponder the possible journey through another decade without her — smiles.

It’s an easy guess. She always smiled, even when in pain and exhaustion, as she ate the breakfast I made for her.

When I told her, only weeks before she passed to the other side, what the doctor said, she wiped the last of the egg from her lips, smiled and said, “Then you should start making plans.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For what you’re doing to do with those years without me. You’ll have to learn how to write checks and pay the bills and close the windows when it rains.”

This was a conversation we often had as we aged together.

She always said she would probably be the first to get off life’s bus and end our journey together, and I always dismissed it.

And then she did.

Plans, she said then, should be made for that day, that moment, so that when you find yourself alone sitting at some traffic light staring ahead at the red one, and wondering which way to go, left or right or straight ahead, and with horns behind you blaring, it’s then you’ll have to decide.

She didn’t say that then but just now, this very moment as I hear (as I often do lately) her whispers, with, “Don’t forget your keys, your license and money.”

No, I’m not drinking again or going over the edge. She’s here, unseen by my sleepy human eyes, still rearranging my sentences.

This was that woman, you see, who for years had proofed each of my columns so the editors at the paper would be amazed at how well I placed or avoided commas. She seems unwilling to give that up.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she seems to whisper from behind my sleepy mind.

“They will think you’ve gone back to drinking.”

Sometimes, her whispers come in those moments when the first light breaks and I need her advice most. She would whisper, “Remember when you joked that you might go into a monastery full of silent brothers? You couldn’t do that; they would toss you out at the joke.”

Then: “Why not the priesthood?” She’d whisper. “You’d make a good-looking priest.”

“You’re right,” I would I answer. “Always looked so handsome in black, with that white collar, wow!”

And all those nuns without veils, and I’d get to listen to all of the secret confessions?

Remember when I’d played a priest three times, in New York and once during a rehearsal went out for lunch in costume and a guy at the next table had an attack and his wife looked at me and said, “Father.”

I woke up suddenly and the words and the title came to me: “Father Jerry.”

And She whispered as she left the light: “Father Jerry … And you always look so great in black.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.