That is why it is the part people want.
But a woman wrote me eleven letters over six years and never posted one of them, and I lived in her house that whole time, and I never once asked her why she wore a chain under her clothes.
I had twenty years of evenings with that woman.
Thousands of them. Soup, the television, the crossword she could not finish after 2021, the four doses, the hoist, the two in the morning.
I know what she could not swallow, and which side she had to be turned on, and the name of the dog she had in 1958, and what her mother used to say about rain.
And I did not know the single most important fact about her own life, which she was wearing against her skin the entire time.
And the only reason I know anything at all about my own life is that she managed, four days before she died, to write three words down.
If somebody is carrying something they have never told you about —
you have fewer evenings left with them than you think.
Ask while they can still hold a pen.
Not the big question. There is never a good moment for the big question and there is never going to be one.
Ask the small one. What’s that, round your neck?
Four words, at a kitchen table, in about 2015, while she was still able to answer them.
Because she tried.
Eleven times, over six years, at a kitchen table, in her own handwriting, in a house where I was in the next room most of those evenings.
Eleven attempts to say one thing to somebody who was eleven feet away.
And then she put all of it in a box forty miles away.
And wore the key against her skin for fourteen years — through two strokes, four hospital admissions, and about six thousand mornings of me doing up the back of her nightdress.
May you like
Waiting to be asked one question.
Which neither of her sons ever asked her, and which I never asked her either, and I was the one who saw it every single day.
