For maybe five seconds, standing on that hill in the cold, I almost believed him — that’s the part I can’t get around. Two hundred and forty Tuesdays and I still stood there for five seconds running an audit of myself, checking whether I’d missed some week in 2022, because that’s what he’s done to me since we were children and it still works. Then I stopped him. The man at the far end of the cemetery was a hospice chaplain named Roy who’d sat with our father every Thursday for the last fourteen months. I called him in February when Dad stopped being able to follow a conversation, and Roy kept coming after Dad stopped being able to follow anything at all.
Roy walked over and shook my brother’s hand and said he was sorry for his loss, and then he said, kindly, without any edge on it, “Your dad talked about you.” My brother’s face did something. Roy meant it as a comfort. Then he asked which one of us was Michael, because that’s the name Dad said when he was frightened at night, and I’m Michael, and my brother heard that standing in the mud in a good coat. I didn’t plan it. I want to be honest — I stopped him because I wanted him to have to stand there, and then the thing that happened was worse than anything I could have arranged.
He didn’t come to the lunch. He sent a text in April that said he’d been dealing with a lot that year, which is as close as he gets. I have the visitor logs from the facility and I have never once shown them to anyone, and I’ve thought about why, and I think it’s because using them would make it about the count, and the count was never the thing. The thing was Thursday afternoons with a man who didn’t know my name by the end. Roy sends a card at Christmas. My brother and I speak at holidays about the weather. I’ve stopped waiting for him to say it, and the five seconds don’t come anymore.
