These are not the same as knowing what she knew. They are what I have.
## Dad’s Study
Before the reading on Tuesday, I’d spent part of the afternoon in my father’s study. Vanessa had said she’d handle the sorting eventually, but for now everything was still as he’d left it. Which felt like both a gift and an ambush.
He had a particular organizational system that made sense only to him. Papers in manila folders labeled in his handwriting, which started as legible and became increasingly abbreviated over the years — I found folders labeled things like ‘misc fin’ and ‘car stuff 2019+’ and, inexplicably, ‘FRMS’ which I never decoded. Books stacked by some principle that was not alphabetical or chronological or by subject. A box on the windowsill containing: three AA batteries, a broken watch, a cufflink with no pair, and a birthday card I’d sent him in 2019 that said ‘Happy birthday, old man. Glad you’re still here.’ He’d kept it.
I sat on the floor of his study for a while with that card.
He had kept a lot of things. A folder of newspaper clippings about local politics going back twenty years. Programs from events I didn’t know he’d attended. A photograph of himself as a young man that I’d never seen — he was maybe twenty-five, standing in front of a car, squinting against the sun, looking like someone I barely recognized and also somehow unmistakably him.
I kept the card and the photograph. I put them in my bag. I don’t know if that was appropriate — nothing about that week felt entirely appropriate — but I think he would have been fine with it.