Young adult to middle-aged woman in a white tank top inside a vehicle with red seat, modern steering wheel design, logo on seat reading 'H', daytime car interior setting. 2:01
John Wikstrom channel icon John WikstromOriginal creator 298K views Save

A wife's poem “But You Didn't” comes to life

She dented his car and dragged him camping in the rain he warned her about. Each time she braced for the blowup, and each time it never came. more

Those memories come from “But You Didn't,” a poem credited to Merrill Glass, which John Wikstrom turned into a short film. The story that travels with the poem says the writer was a widow. After she died of old age, her daughter was sorting through her things and found the poem she had written to her husband.

The list keeps going. She flirted with other guys to make him jealous, it worked, and she was sure he would leave her. He didn't. She spilled food on their brand-new rug and waited for him to lose it, but he didn't do that either.

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She flirts with other guys to make him jealous, and she's sure he will leave her.

Then she adds it all up. “You put up with me and you loved me and protected me.” There were things she wanted to make up to him when he came home, and this time the refrain lands hard. He didn't come home.

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All the things she meant to make up to him wait for a homecoming that doesn't happen.

It would be easy to stop there. Instead the poem turns to someone new. “I wondered if she'd have the best of you,” the wife says, and she did, with his eyes and his smile. She got the worst of him too, his stubbornness and his will.

Young adult to middle-aged woman in a white tank top inside a vehicle with red seat, modern steering wheel design, logo on seat reading 'H', daytime car interior setting. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
She dented his car and dragged him camping in the rain he warned her about.

In the last lines she wonders if the ways she still sees him in her mean he never really left. Then the two words that closed every memory come one more time. “And you didn't.”

A woman smiles in dim light, with blurred red lights behind her and a bright bulb overhead. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
She still sees him in someone else, and the last two words say he never really left.

For the first time, those words are a comfort. Early on they meant he let her off easy, and once they meant he never came home. At the end they mean he stayed.