There’s a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I’ll not be parting with that, nor our bed - the four-poster - I’ll be needing that to die in.

In this domestic, unsentimental recollection, Hayes ties objects to the emotional architecture of a long marriage. The “vanity chair” and the “four-poster” are not valuable as antiques but as repositories of shared history—tokens of courtship, intimacy, and continuity. Her refusal to “part” with them suggests a resistance to the way time, moves, or estate-clearing can erase a life’s texture. The final clause—“I’ll be needing that to die in”—compresses devotion and mortality into a plainspoken vow: the marriage is imagined as lasting to the end, and the bed becomes a symbol of both love’s everydayness and its ultimate horizon.