It is the ordinary kind — a disagreement, a position taken, a silence that went on slightly too long to be broken easily, and then a year, and then a decade.
She never went back.
And that fund is what she did instead of going back.
Fourteen years of paying for funerals for women she had never met, because there was one in her own family in 1983 that she did not attend.
Her mother’s. In the March of that year.
She was twenty-eight and she was four hours away and she did not go, and she has written four lines about that too, and those four lines are the only place in thirty-one pages where her handwriting changes.
There are two words crossed out. Heavily, several times, so that neither Ferris nor I can read them.
A woman who kept a file on a stranger for two years, and who left instructions for a fund, and who planned a wedding from a bed — and the only thing in the whole of it she could not leave standing was two words about her own mother.
That is the actual shape of this and it is not the shape anybody wants.
And then the part that took the ground out from under me a second time, and that I did not understand until about three in the morning.
She knew I would post the photograph.
She chose somebody who would.
There is a page in that file — page nineteen — which is a printout of my own social media from two years before we met.
It is not creepy. It is four lines of notes in her handwriting and one of them says: posts everything. good.
Two words in that line have stayed with me longer than anything else in thirty-one pages.
Not posts everything. That is just observation, and it is accurate, and I have since deleted about two hundred things.
Good.
Somebody looked at the most thoughtless habit I have — the one I would list if you asked me what I like least about myself — and wrote good next to it in pencil, because it was useful to her.
I have never been recruited for a quality before. Certainly not for that one.
Because after a lifetime of being a person nobody could find, she wanted to be seen. Once. By a great many people.
And she needed somebody who would do it without asking her, because asking her would have meant her having to say it out loud, and a woman who left in 1981 and never went back is not a woman who can say I would like to be looked at to another human being.
