For maybe eight seconds, standing at that podium in front of three hundred people, I heard my own absence described accurately — because from where they sat, it was true. I wasn’t at the house those last four months. I wasn’t at the Sunday dinners his sister organized, I wasn’t in the photographs, and when they came to visit I was usually not there. What they didn’t know is that he asked me not to be. In February he started dictating letters and he couldn’t do it with anyone in the building who might walk in, so I drove to the hospice, and I sat with him from ten at night until four or five in the morning, five nights a week, while everyone else came at two in the afternoon and found him asleep.
There were nineteen letters. One for each grandchild to open at eighteen, one for his sister, one for his brother in Arizona, one for the man he’d fallen out with in 1994. He’d wanted to say things he couldn’t say to faces. I read three sentences of his sister’s aloud from that podium, with her permission — I asked her from the microphone and she nodded because three hundred people were watching — and then I stopped and stepped down and handed them out at the back of the church like a woman passing out programs. I didn’t read any of the others. That wasn’t mine to do.
She came to my kitchen in June. She said she’d assumed the worst because she’d never once seen my car in the driveway, and I said that’s fair, and I meant it, and then I told her about the four in the morning bathroom floor and she put her head down on my table. We’re not close now. We’re something — she calls on the twelfth of every month, which is the day he died, and neither of us has ever mentioned why. What I’ve had to sit with is that I let them believe it for four months because he asked me to, and I’d do it again, and the price of doing a private thing well is that it looks exactly like doing nothing at all.
