“Then start tonight. You’re on shift tonight?”
“Eleven to seven.”
“Buy a notebook on the way in. Date, name, and the truest thing they say. That’s the whole system, it cost him four dollars in 1979, and you’ll have thirty of them by Christmas.”
He bought a notebook.
I know because he sent me a photograph of the first page eleven days later, and it says a date, and a name, and: “He wants somebody to know he never learned to read and he ran a crew for twenty years anyway.”
He’s up to two hundred and six.
There are nine people now.
Nine, that I know of — a paramedic, two hosp*ce nurses, a night-shift chaplain, a woman in another state who read about it and started her own, and four volunteers on my program — all of them keeping a notebook, all of them asking the question, none of them collecting pull tabs because that was Marguerite’s and Alden’s and belongs to 1983.
Nobody finishes another man’s list.
They start their own.
That’s what he actually left me, and it took me two years to see it: not a bag and not a notebook, but a system so cheap and so simple that a boiler mechanic invented it in one night and any tired person on any night shift can run it with a drugstore notebook and one question.
The thirty-one families took their cards home.
The other eleven hundred and nine are in a case at the hosp*ce where he volunteered longest, in the family lounge, where people wait — because Sister Perpetua said, at ninety-one, with total certainty, “Not a wall, dear. A room where people are sitting. They need something to read at three in the morning that isn’t a magazine.”
It’s read constantly.
The staff told me they find the case open every morning.
I still volunteer.
Thursdays.
I’ve done it for four years now, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve done eleven hundred rooms or that I ever will, and I do it differently than he did, because I’m not him.
I don’t take the tabs.
I take a photograph of the room’s window, whatever the view is, and I write the name and the date and the true thing on the back of the print, and I have ninety-one of them in a box.
Ninety-one.
He’d have found that funny — he was very direct about the fact that the tabs were free and my system is expensive.
