Chapter 17
WHIT
I keep the funeral program in the inside pocket of my jacket, folded twice, and I take it out now the way other men take out a photograph.
It is a single sheet, cream, her name across the top in the font the funeral home uses for everyone.
Inside, near the bottom, there is a paragraph that begins With gratitude.
I wrote it. Or I approved it — I don't remember which anymore, and the difference has stopped mattering.
It thanks the celebrant by name. It thanks the two physicians who managed her care.
It thanks the hospice team. It thanks Nadia for holding things together so the family could be present.
I read that paragraph aloud at the podium. I stood in front of two hundred people and read a list of who had mattered to my mother's dying, and I read it correctly except for the one name that mattered most, which was not on the paper, because I am the one who told them what to print.
That is what a eulogy is. I understand it now, at the desk in her house, at an hour when I should be asleep and am not. A eulogy is a list of who was in the room. I got the list wrong on purpose without knowing I was doing it.
The reflex arrives first. I know exactly what to do about a wrong list. You fund a thing.
You call the hospice, you endow something, you put a number behind the apology so large it stops being an apology and becomes a building.
You let a photographer come. You stand in front of the new sign in a good coat and you let the correction be seen, because a correction no one witnessed never happened, and a man who is not witnessed is a man who might be lying.
My hand is already on the phone. I take it off.
I sit with the program instead, and I make myself read the names the slow way, one at a time, the way I did not read them the first time.
The hospice nurse. She taught Sara the sponge swabs this past spring — I know this because it is in the notebooks, in my mother's hand, the nurse showed the girl how, and now the girl does it better.
I was in Frankfurt that spring. The physician who managed the morphine, whose name I said clearly into a microphone: I spoke with him twice, both times by phone, both times while a car took me somewhere.
The aide who came Sundays. The woman at the front desk who my mother, in a dated entry I have now read so many times I could recite it, called the one who remembers I take milk.
Every name on the program is a person who was in the room when I was on a call. That is the list. I built it to thank the people who stood where I did not stand, and I did not once notice that the thanking was itself the not-standing.
The nausea comes the way it comes now: not a wave, a slow settling, like something taking on water. I don't reach for anything to stop it. I have learned there is nothing to reach for. The old reflexes go out one at a time and nothing comes on where they were.
In the morning I drive to the hospice. Not the phone.
I drive — the better part of the morning, up the county road — and I go in through the doors my mother went through, and I sit across a desk from the administrator, and I tell her I want to establish a fund for the families.
Not for the building. For the families — the people who sit up all night the way my mother's people sat up, the ones who run out of money before they run out of nights.
She has a folder ready before I finish. People like me come in with grief and a checkbook; she knows the type; I am the type.
She asks what we should call it. She has a form. There is a line for the name of the fund, and a line, below it, for the donor to be recognized.
"Leave the second line blank," I say.
She looks up. She thinks she has misheard me, or that I am being modest and will let her talk me out of it, which is what men like me do — we decline the recognition so that declining it becomes the recognition.
"No plaque," I say. "No announcement. If someone has to know a name to receive help, use theirs, not mine.
" And then I do the thing I came to do. I take the program out of my pocket and I put it on her desk and I go down it.
The fund carries the staff's names: the nurse, the doctors, the aide, the woman at the front desk.
Each of them a line. Each of them a person who was in the room.
I read the list to her the way I should have read it from the podium, slowly, getting every one of them right, and this time the getting-right happens where no one who was hurt by the getting-wrong will ever see it.
She writes them down. Somewhere in the list she stops writing and looks at me, because she has done this a long time and she can hear that the names are coming out of me in an order — not the program's order, the order of a debt.
The aide who came Sundays: my mother wrote that he stayed forty minutes past his shift once to finish a story he was telling her, and I paid him for none of those minutes and did not know his shift had an end.
The woman at the front desk who remembered the milk.
I read her name and my voice does the thing it has started doing, catches on nothing, on an ordinary name, and I wait until it steadies and I go on.
"Thank you," the administrator says when I finish, "for thinking of them," and the ordinary kindness of it lands on me like a hand I don't deserve, because that is the sentence — some version of that exact sentence — that I said to my wife while she did the work these people are being thanked for, and I said it the way you thank the staff, and I never once heard the difference until there was no one left in the house to say it to.
She does not understand what I am doing and I am not going to explain it, because the explaining would be another photographer.
I sign the amount. I put the pen down. There is no relief in it.
I had forgotten there is supposed to be relief in it, or I had never known, having always taken the picture before the feeling could arrive.
I drive back with the empty passenger seat and my mother's letter running under everything, as it has for weeks.
Four years of watching from the bed. She kept a record.
She itemized me: the months, the calls I made instead of the visits I didn't, laid out in a lawyer's office in front of my sisters until it was undeniable.
I have read the notebooks now. I know how the entries about me got shorter.
I know the page with my name and nothing under it.
So I am doing the only thing the letter leaves a man to do.
I am building the answer to it. Not saying the answer — I have lost the right to say things, I said too many of them and they were all correct and all wrong.
Building it. Name by name. Correcting the speech one omission at a time, in rooms where the correction cannot be admired.
By the time I reach the house I have corrected almost all of it. Every name from the program is on the fund now, made right, made private. The list is nearly whole.
There is one name I do not give the administrator.
I know before I walk in that I won't. It rides in my pocket the whole way down — Sara's name, which is not on the program at all, because I saw to that without meaning to.
I could add it here. A line in the folder, her name beside the nurse's, made right and made quiet, the whole thing closed in an afternoon.
My hand knows exactly how. That is the reason I don't. It would be the same thing I already did — storing her outside the room a second time, in a kinder room, and calling it repair.
Her name is not a correction I get to file.
The others I wronged in private, and in private I can pay them back: a fund, a list, the wrong settled where I made it.
Not her. I take her name out and look at it and no number comes to me, none of the arithmetic that comes for everything else.
What comes is her. Her hand flat on a dying woman's chest at three in the morning, counting the breaths down while I was over an ocean and called it providing.
The mouth-swabs four times a night, learned from a nurse I was too far away to meet.
The way she read that failing body better than the physicians I paid to read it, and got thanked for none of it by the one whose thanks would have told her she was seen.
She was never a line I forgot to fill in.
She is the whole reason there was ever a room, and I spent years thanking her for keeping it instead of walking into it.
There is no folder deep enough for that and no line quiet enough, because the thing I owe her was never money — money is the cheapest thing I have ever had — it is the one thing I never gave her, which is only to be a man who came.
She is owed the thing I do not yet know how to spend.
So I leave her name off. On purpose. I keep it folded in my pocket against the program — the one name I am not permitted to make comfortable, the one debt I can't quiet with my hands the way I've quieted all the others tonight.
I don't know yet what answers it. I know only what doesn't: not a check, not a plaque, not a name retired into a line no one reads.
Not any of the moves I still reach for before I catch my own hand.
Whatever it is, it will cost more than I have ever learned how to spend, and I will be a long time paying it before I am anywhere near even with her.
I put the program back in my pocket with her name still inside it, unspent. In my mother's house, at the desk, at an hour when I should be asleep and am not, it sits against my chest heavier empty than the whole fund was full.