The unit is empty now. I gave notice on it in the spring; there was no sense paying to store an empty room, and the woman in the office was nice about it and did not ask.
Everything came to my house over two trips in Marcus’s brother’s van.
People ask what I did with it all, and they ask in a way that suggests they expect either a bonfire or a shrine. It was neither. It was mostly just admin, which is the thing nobody tells you about grief for a person you didn’t know: an enormous amount of it is boxes and decisions and where does this go.
The Le Creuset dish is in my kitchen. I use it. It is a good dish and it would be absurd not to, and I have made a peace with the fact that most weeks I take it out of the cupboard without thinking about him at all, which felt like a betrayal for about four months and now just feels like owning a dish.
The Beanie Baby is on a shelf in my daughter’s room. She is six. She calls it Grandpa’s Platypus, which she came up with entirely on her own and which I have never once been able to hear without having to leave the room.
The bike helmet, the Discman, the green dress and about half the rest went to a women’s shelter in Fresno, because they were unused, some of them still had tags, and the alternative was a garage full of clothes in sizes I stopped being twenty years ago. I thought about that decision for a long time and I think he would have been fine with it. He was not, from the evidence, a sentimental man about objects. He was sentimental about the buying.
The letters are in the cabinet, which is in my office, with the masking tape still on the front.
I read all two hundred and sixteen of them over about four months. Roughly two a night, at the kitchen table, after Marcus and Ivy had gone up.
Some nights I couldn’t. Some nights I did six.
I would not recommend it and I would not undo it. What I’d say about it is that it is a very strange thing to meet your father in reverse — to get him at sixty-eight in the first week and at thirty-eight by Christmas, to know how the story ends before you know anything about the man, to watch him get younger and more hopeful the further in you go. By March I was reading letters from a man in his thirties who still thought this was fixable, and I knew exactly how much of that he had left, and there was nothing to be done about it.
He was not a saint. I should say that, because I can hear how this reads. He was often boring. He was self-pitying in about a dozen of them in a way that made me put the page down. He had opinions about my mother in 1997 that were unfair and that he knew were unfair while he was writing them. There are two letters from 1996 that I think he wrote drunk.
And there is the enormous, unanswerable fact that he never came.
He wrote two hundred and sixteen letters and he never once drove two hours up the 99 and knocked on the door. My mother told him to fight her and he did not fight her. He filed instead. He was, in the end, a man who found it easier to document a love than to have it, and I am the person who has to live in the results of that, and I have not fully forgiven it and I am not sure I’m going to.
Both things. Always both things. I got there in the end but I want to be honest that I didn’t get there kindly.
My mother and I are all right.
Not the same. It cost something and the something did not come back. There is a carefulness between us now that wasn’t there before, and I notice it most on the phone, and I have stopped expecting it to wear off.
But she comes on Sundays. She has met the platypus. In January she asked, without any lead-up, whether she could read the 1995 letter — the first one, the one to a seven-year-old — and I said yes and I went out to the kitchen and did the washing up for a very long time, and when I came back she’d folded it up and put it back in its envelope and squared the corners.
She said: “He was better at it than I gave him credit for.”
That’s all she’s ever said about them. I’m not going to push for more. She’s seventy-four and she’s the one who stayed.
There is one box left.
It was the big one, the tall one leaning against the end of the rack, and it is the only thing from that unit I have not opened.
The year in the corner is not a year. Where every other box has 1995 or 2011 or 2019, this one, in the same square capitals, says:
FOR IVY. WHENEVER.
Ivy is my daughter. She was born in 2019. He never met her, never saw her except as a printout in a filing cabinet, and at some point in the last four years of his life he bought something for her, wrapped it in paper with balloons on it, wrote her name on the corner, and put it on the shelf with the others.
It’s on top of the wardrobe in my room.
I’m not going to open it. It isn’t mine, and I have learned something in the last year and a half about people deciding on your behalf what you get to know and when, and I am not doing that to her.
So it waits. She’ll be sixteen or twenty-five or thirty-eight, and one day she’ll ask about her grandfather properly — not the platypus, the actual question — and I’ll take it down and hand it to her and tell her everything in this account, including the parts where nobody comes out well.
And then she can open it, or not.
That’ll be up to her. Somebody in this family should get to choose.