I found my own obituary in a folder in my father’s desk. It was typed, two paragraphs, with my name, my school, and my mother’s maiden name. It was dated 1994, when I was twenty-three and living in Denver, and nothing happened to me that year. My father died in 2018, and that folder had been sitting unopened in my garage ever since. There was a second page behind it, typed on the same machine, and it was a list of eleven names with dates beside them.
I recognized the first three names immediately because they belonged to people I had known growing up. One was my father’s old business partner, another was a neighbor, and the third was a teacher from my high school. All three were dead now, but their dates didn’t match the years they actually died. I checked the remaining names online and found the same pattern—every date was years before the person’s real death. Then I reached the tenth name and realized it belonged to someone who was still alive.
I called the number listed beside that name, expecting it to be disconnected. A woman answered, and when I told her my name, she immediately asked if my father was still alive. I said he had died in 2018, and she was silent for several seconds. Then she asked whether I’d found the folder. I asked what folder she meant, but she wouldn’t answer. Instead, she told me to look underneath the obituary, because my father had left something there that he never wanted me to see.
There was a small photograph taped to the back of the page. It showed eleven people standing outside a building I’d never seen before, and my father was among them. I recognized the tenth person from the list immediately because she was the woman I’d just spoken to on the phone. On the back of the photograph was a date from 1994 and a handwritten sentence in my father’s handwriting. It said, “We thought we had lost him that night.” I turned the photograph over again, and suddenly understood why my own name was the first one on the list.:::
