A few days before he died I was sitting beside his bed. His hand was thin in mine and his voice was still steady.
He said: when they come, don’t argue with them at the door.
I said: when who comes?
He already knew. He said: your parents.
And he squeezed my hand and said: let them in.
I said: I don’t want to let them in.
And he said: I know. That’s why I’m asking.
I leaned closer. I said: why?
He said: let them talk.
Then: let them show everybody exactly who they are.
I said: and then?
He looked straight at me. He said: open my study.
Four words. He had enough left for four words and he spent them on that.
That was all.
He did not explain. I did not ask, because he was seventy-nine and it was eleven at night and I thought he was tired and wandering.
I have replayed that conversation about four hundred times since, and the thing I notice now is that he was not wandering at all. Every sentence is in order. He had the sequence worked out.
He had worked out the sequence of a morning he was not going to be alive for.
So I did none of it.
I did not shout.
I did not tell the movers to leave, which I could have done and which they would have obeyed inside four seconds.
I did not argue when my sister took the master bedroom, which is the room he died in eleven days earlier and which still had a chair by the window.
I did not answer when my father started giving orders, and I said nothing when my mother called me a burden in the house I had lived in since I was five.
I just let them talk.
I let them assume. I let them give instructions about rooms. I let my sister go upstairs and decide about paint.
I let them lay out exactly who they were, at full volume, in front of twenty people, for eleven minutes and forty seconds.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done and it looked, from the outside, like a girl in a flannel shirt standing still.
