The stack of papers was in Vanessa’s hands before I’d even taken off my coat.
“I thought we should all hear it together,” she said. “Dad would have wanted that.”
We were in our parents’ old living room — my parents’ old living room, I kept correcting myself, the house that was just Dad’s now and would soon be neither. Aunt June was already on the couch with a cup of tea. Our cousin Deb had driven two hours. Vanessa’s husband Theo stood near the kitchen doorway with the posture of someone who expected to be called on to carry things.
I didn’t know then that my name wasn’t going to appear in anything Vanessa read. I didn’t know she was holding a photocopy with a page missing. I was thirty-five years old and I’d been crying on and off for four days and I thought the hardest part was done.
It wasn’t.
## After
My father, Martin Ellis, died on a Thursday morning in September. He was seventy-two. Heart failure, though his heart had been giving us warnings for three years. He’d had a pacemaker since the previous spring and we’d been pretending everything was fine, which is a thing our family does extremely well.
The funeral was Saturday. By Monday morning, Vanessa had made calls I didn’t know she was making, handled logistics I didn’t know needed handling, and positioned herself as the person the family would turn to. This was not entirely unfair. She had lived forty minutes from Dad for the last decade, and I was in Portland, and for the last three years of his declining health, Vanessa had been the one who took him to the cardiologist and stocked his refrigerator and called to make sure he’d taken his medication.