Then I kept walking, because I was going to be late.
But I thought about it all day. The specific green of it. The way he’d zoomed in so close that the fronds took up the whole frame. Whatever he’d been thinking when he took it.
I never asked him. There were a lot of things I never asked him, which is part of what it means to lose someone before you expected to. You run out of time before you run out of questions.
I ordered a fern for my apartment, about a week later. It’s in the corner near the window. It’s doing reasonably well, which apparently is not guaranteed with ferns; I looked it up and they have specific preferences. It’s alive, so I’m probably doing something right.
It’s just a plant. It’s not a communication from anywhere. I know this.
It’s also, in some way I don’t fully know how to articulate, a way of paying attention to something he paid attention to. That feels like the right word. Not grief exactly, not memorial exactly. Attention.
He paid attention to things. I’m trying to pay attention back.
## After Distribution
There’s a period, after an estate closes, where you’re supposed to be done. The formal process is complete. The accounting is settled. The distribution is done. Everyone received what they were entitled to under the document. You’re done.
You’re not done.
The estate closes but the father doesn’t stop being gone. The family doesn’t become a different family. The questions that the estate surfaced don’t resolve because the legal part is over. The sister who did what she did remains your sister, in the specific permanent way that those relationships work.