I married a stranger from a hospital waiting room so he wouldn’t d*e alone — after our one-week marriage, his lawyer handed me his backpack, saying, “He wanted you to know the truth.”

“February 28, 2011. Marguerite Halloran — different Marguerite. She taught 4,100 children and can name 60.”

“September 9, 2018. Dexter Sowande. He didn’t write the song but he named it.”

And then, three hundred pages in, the handwriting starts to change.

It gets larger around 2020.

Shakier by 2023.

And the last forty entries are in a different pen and slope down the page, and one of them — November of last year, four months before I met him — has a note in the margin that is not part of the format.

It says: “Getting hard to hold the pen. Ask Sato about somebody to finish it. No — don’t. Nobody finishes another man’s list.”

Nobody finishes another man’s list.

He wrote that at seventy-two with a heart that was failing, four months before a twenty-nine-year-old volunteer walked into his room, and then he put me on the last line himself, in that shaky pen, eleven days before he d*ed.