The page was dated the same Wednesday he called me. I recognized his handwriting immediately, and the first line was my name. He had written that he had been thinking about calling me for several weeks but kept finding reasons not to. He wrote that there was something he wanted to tell me, but he wasn’t sure whether saying it would make anything better. Then, halfway down the page, he had written a sentence and crossed it out so heavily that I could barely read it.
I asked my mother whether she had ever seen the page before. She said no, and then she admitted she had been afraid to open his desk because she knew there were things he had never told either of us. I sat at his old desk and read the notes slowly, trying to imagine him writing them at seventy-nine. He had written about mistakes he regretted, people he had hurt, and conversations he had postponed for years. Then I found my name again, followed by a question he had apparently been carrying since I was a child. I had no idea what it meant.
The final paragraph was only three sentences long. He wrote that he had spent most of his life believing that saying something once could repair the damage caused by years of silence. Then he wrote that he finally understood it didn’t work that way. The last sentence was unfinished, ending after the words, “If he asks me why I waited, I’ll tell him…” I stared at the empty space after the final word for a long time. My father had apparently been planning to finish that sentence, and he never got the chance.
I took the page home with me that evening. For eleven years I had wondered whether his phone call had meant something important, and now I knew it had. I still didn’t know exactly what he had intended to tell me, but the notes made one thing clear: he had been trying to find the courage to say it. My mother called me later and said she had found one more envelope beneath the papers on his desk. She said my name was written on the front, and beneath it were four words: “Open this if I don’t.”
