That is a real thing that happened to me and it took about nine days. People at the hospice started introducing me that way. Somebody from a local paper rang the office.
I had eleven other patients in that building that year.
I can remember three of their names. I have tried to do it as an exercise, sitting down, with a pen, and I get to three and then nothing.
There is a man I sat with for four Thursdays in the November whose name I have tried to retrieve for two years and cannot, and the nurses will not tell me, correctly, because it is not mine to have.
I gave that woman a wedding and I gave the other eleven the amount of attention left over from being the person who had given somebody a wedding.
There is a specific afternoon in the December.
A woman in the room two doors down asked me whether I would sit with her for a bit, and I said I would come back in twenty minutes, because I was helping somebody from the local paper find a photograph.
I did go back. It was about fifty minutes and she was asleep.
She passed in the January and I had four conversations with her in total and I remember none of them.
I remember the name of the journalist.
And one more, which I have only said out loud once.
When Ferris said she didn’t choose you by accident, the first thing I felt was not shock.
It was relief.
Because for eleven days I had been carrying a low, specific anxiety about whether I had used a dying woman for a photograph. It had been sitting under everything. I had not named it.
And a man in a dark suit handed me an envelope that said: she planned it, she chose you, you were doing what she wanted.
And I felt the weight come off.
That is the true chronology and it is not flattering. I was let off before I was told anything, and I took it.
And I have wondered — properly, not rhetorically — whether she intended that too.
Whether a woman who could time a rota by eleven weeks might also have worked out that the person who posts a photograph of a dying stranger is going to need absolution by about the second week.
The file does not say. Ferris says no, and he knew her for nineteen years, and he says she was not sentimental enough to think about how I would feel afterwards.
