I’ve gotten better at holding things that won’t clarify. This may be the primary skill that grief teaches, if it teaches anything. Not resolution but tolerance for the unresolved. Not knowing but functioning in the presence of not knowing.
My father would probably have had an engineering metaphor for this. He thought in systems, in tolerances, in the language of things built to function within an acceptable range of uncertainty. Maybe that’s what I’m doing: functioning within an acceptable range of the uncertain.
It’s a strange inheritance. But it’s mine.
## Who Else Was There
I’ve written mostly about Vanessa and about Dad and about the people who called me or didn’t call me in the weeks after the reading. But there were others in the room that Tuesday night who I haven’t mentioned.
There was a neighbor, a man named Gerald, who’d been close with my father for years and had been invited as a mark of respect. He was in his late seventies, soft-spoken, had brought a dish of something to the house. He sat through the reading without expression and left early, politely, saying he’d be in touch. He probably didn’t follow the page number issue at all. He was there to honor his friend.
There was Theo’s sister, who had come up for the funeral and extended her stay by a day. I barely knew her. She seemed confused by the tension in the room. She left when Gerald left.
There was a woman I didn’t recognize who turned out to be Vanessa’s friend from work, who had offered to come for moral support. She sat very still and left quickly and I never spoke to her directly.