So I had it printed, and I took it to her house in the November, and she looked at it for a long time at a kitchen table.
And then she said: she’s got my grandmother’s hands.
That photograph has been seen by something like four hundred thousand people, for about nine seconds each, and one person has ever looked at it and seen a family.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a young woman who gave a dying stranger the day of her life.
I did give it to her. That afternoon was real, the dress was real, and when she held her hand up she was not performing for anybody.
But she arranged the whole of it, and she arranged me, and the only part I contributed on my own was the part I did not ask permission for.
If you are doing something kind for somebody who cannot ask you for much —
ask them the small thing anyway.
Ask them before you tell anyone. Ask them while they can still say no.
Because a person at the end of their life has usually stopped being able to request things, and has not stopped having preferences, and the gap between those two is exactly the size of whatever you decide to do with them.
She wanted it posted. I got lucky.
Eleven words would have made it hers instead of mine.
I had them. She was forty feet down a corridor and awake, and the light was on, and I know it was on because I walked past the door.
I have thought about that walk about four hundred times, and the truthful thing is that I did not decide not to ask her.
May you like
I simply did not think of it. It never came up in my own head as an option.
That is worse than deciding, and it is what most of us actually do, and it is why I have written all of this down.
