And then I opened the doors.
It ran four days.
The notice had gone out through the hospital, two hospices, three churches, a genealogy society, and a local paper that ran two hundred words on a Thursday, and what I expected was maybe thirty people.
Four hundred and sixteen came.
They walked the tables and looked for names.
And here is the thing I could not have predicted and that I think about constantly: most of them did not find one.
Of four hundred and sixteen people, thirty-one found a relative’s name on a card.
The other three hundred and eighty-five walked eleven hundred and forty index cards, reading strangers’ last true sentences, and did not leave.
That’s what got me.
They didn’t leave.
People stood at those tables for an hour, two hours, reading:
“He built the courthouse steps.”
“She never learned to swim and lied about it for sixty years.”
“He forgave his brother in 1971 and never said so.”
“She was the fastest typist in the building.”
“He is sorry about the dog.”
Eleven hundred and forty of them.
A woman in her forties stood in front of one card for a very long time and I went over eventually and she said, “This one’s nobody I know. It says ‘she wanted the yellow one.'” She wiped her face. “I’ve been standing here trying to work out what she wanted the yellow one of, and I’m never going to know, and it’s the only thing left of her, and somebody wrote it down.”
Somebody wrote it down.
That’s Alden’s whole life in four words.
On the third day, a man came in who did not read the tables.
He came to the door, looked at eleven hundred and forty index cards, and stood there, and I went over because he looked like he might leave.
He was about sixty.
“I don’t have a name to look for,” he said.
“That’s all right. Most people don’t.”
“No — I mean.” He couldn’t get it out for a second. “I’m a paramedic. Thirty-one years. And I’ve been in a lot of rooms at the end and I’ve never once written anything down and I’ve been standing in that doorway for four minutes trying to count how many, and I can’t, and that’s — I’ve got no notebook. There’s nobody in a case anywhere from my thirty-one years.”
And I said the only thing I had, which is the thing I now say to every one of them, and there have been more than you’d think.
