“Thank you,” I said. “For the initial call.”
“That’s what the consultation is for,” she said.
## The Year After
A year is a strange unit of time in grief. Long enough that people expect you to be somewhere past the acute phase. Short enough that you’re still finding things — a voicemail you forgot to check, an old email thread, a note in a book that has his handwriting in it.
I found a note like that in October, almost exactly a year after. A paperback I’d borrowed from him, at some point, and never returned. Inside the front cover, in his handwriting: a name and a phone number I didn’t recognize, a reminder to himself about something, the kind of marginal notation that exists to be noticed and is noticed after it can be explained.
I called the number, after some deliberation. It was out of service.
I think about him differently now than I did immediately after. In the first weeks, he was a presence I kept reaching for — reflexively texting his number, starting to call before remembering, dreaming about him in the specific way that grief manufactures absences. Now he’s something more settled. Less like a person I keep almost forgetting is gone and more like a permanent feature of the landscape, someone who will always have been there even though he isn’t anymore.
The specific provision on page three is something I think about sometimes with a quality I can only describe as warmth. Not because of the money. Because it is a document in his voice, through Mara Chen’s professional language, that says something I needed to hear and didn’t get to hear from him directly. He valued something about our relationship. He put it in writing. He made it formal and permanent and retrievable, because that was the way he knew how to make things matter.