I married a dy*ng stranger so he wouldn’t leave the world as a nameless file. He had no ring, so he slipped a soda can pull tab onto my finger — and put one on his own, and said a number I didn’t understand: “One thousand one hundred and forty.”
Seven days later his lawyer handed me a green backpack. “He wasn’t who you thought he was.” Inside: a notebook from 1979, and ten pounds of pull tabs.
PART 1
I was twenty-nine and still trying to find my way through the grief of losing my mother.
My name is Willa Brennan, and volunteering at a hospital became the only thing that made that pain feel like it had some purpose.
My mother d*ed alone.
I need to say that at the start, because it’s the whole reason I was in that building.
Not neglected — she had me, and I loved her, and I was forty minutes away on a Tuesday night in February and I did not make it, and a nurse I have never met held her hand at 11:52 p.m. while I was on a highway.
I found out in a parking lot.
And the thing I could not get past — the thing that put me in a volunteer training class eleven weeks later — was not that she’d d*ed. It was that a stranger did the last thing for her, and that I would never be able to thank that stranger, and that somewhere out there was a woman who had held my mother’s hand and gone home and made dinner.
So for almost a year, I spent time with patients who had no family beside them during their final days.
That’s how Alden came into my life.
He was seventy-two, frail, and dy*ng from heart failure.
He always looked exhausted, but somehow he still smiled gently whenever I came to see him.
We began talking.
And within just a few days, our conversations became something both of us looked forward to.
He asked good questions.
That’s what I noticed first and what I understand completely now: in eleven months of sitting with dy*ng people, Alden Voss was the only one who asked me anything.
“What did your mother do?”
“Where were you when you found out?”
“Do you still drive that stretch of highway, or do you go around?”
I go around.
I had never told anyone that, and a seventy-two-year-old man with three weeks to live pulled it out of me in a single afternoon, and I thought at the time it was because he was dy*ng and dy*ng people are direct.
