Afterward, the woman took both my hands and looked at them, then she looked at my father across the room and said, “She learned that piece because your wife asked her to.” My father didn’t answer. The woman told everyone that my mother had known for months she was getting worse, and she’d asked me to play that exact piece at the memorial because it was the one she used to hear me practice when I was a child.
My father finally said my mother had changed her mind. The woman shook her head. She had been there when my mother asked me, and she had even written the request down because my mother was afraid she wouldn’t remember the details later. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a folded sheet of paper with my mother’s handwriting on it. It had the name of the piece, the date of the memorial, and one sentence underneath.
It said, “If he tells her not to play, tell her I asked her myself.” I read it twice. My father looked at the paper and said nothing. Then the woman’s expression changed, and she told me there was something else my mother had asked her to keep until after the memorial. She handed me a small envelope with my name on it.
Inside was a photograph of my mother sitting at the piano, taken only weeks before she died. On the back she’d written, “My hands aren’t strong enough anymore, so let hers say goodbye for me.” I looked across the room at my father. He had spent the entire night trying to stop me from playing because he couldn’t bear hearing the song. And for the first time, I understood that the piano hadn’t been the thing he was angry about. He simply couldn’t stand that the last voice in the room belonged to her.
