I said: “What?”
He said: “Nothing. Take care of yourself.”
I said I would. We hung up. Nine days later he was in the hospital. Two days after that he was gone.
I don’t know what he was going to say. I’ve thought about it more times than I can count. Maybe it was the thing in the text — that he’d been thinking about what he said at Christmas, that the paperwork was done. Maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe it was nothing specific and he’d just wanted to hear my voice for a moment before we ended.
That’s the thing about last conversations: you don’t know they’re last. You treat them like all the others, imperfect and incomplete, and then they’re over, and then they’re permanent, and you keep turning them over looking for what you might have missed.
## Patricia Rourke’s Last Advice
When the accounting was finalized and the distribution was complete, I called Patricia Rourke one more time. Not because I needed more advice — the formal part was done — but because she’d been the first outside voice I’d heard when I was sitting in a hotel room not knowing what to do, and I wanted to close that particular loop.
I told her it had gone correctly. That the executed instrument had been what it was. That the formal process had run on the complete document.
She said she was glad. She said that wasn’t always how these things went.
“What do you see, in your work?” I asked. “When something like this happens in a family — when one person tries to control what everyone else knows about the will — what usually happens?”