Then I sat there for a while longer, because the afternoon was nice and there was no particular hurry.
Before I left, I looked at his name on the stone. Martin George Ellis. The dates of his life. A person who existed in the world for seventy-two years and paid attention to ferns and kept score meticulously in board games and couldn’t always find the words but tried, at the end, in the way that was available to him.
I said: I saw it, Dad. The page was there.
Then I drove home.
## The Week Between the Funeral and the Reading
I’ve been thinking about that week more carefully. The five days between Saturday’s funeral and Tuesday’s reading.
I was staying in a hotel because I’d never lived in this city — I’d grown up here, left at eighteen for college, and built my life elsewhere. Vanessa had lived here the whole time, forty minutes from Dad, three years of caretaking that I wasn’t here for. The city itself was familiar in the way things from your childhood are familiar: you know where things used to be, not necessarily where they are now.
I spent those five days doing the things you do. Thanking people. Eating food other people brought. Going through the motions of daily life while the actual substance of life felt remote and inaccessible. Crying at odd moments — not at the service, where I’d been held together by the social requirement of being held together, but alone in the hotel room, or in the car, or once in the dairy aisle of a grocery store in a way that I’d had to just let happen and then leave.