There is a man I sat with for four Thursdays in the November whose name I have tried to retrieve for two years and cannot, and the nurses will not tell me, correctly, because it is not mine to have.
I gave that woman a wedding and I gave the other eleven the amount of attention left over from being the person who had given somebody a wedding.
There is a specific afternoon in the December.
A woman in the room two doors down asked me whether I would sit with her for a bit, and I said I would come back in twenty minutes, because I was helping somebody from the local paper find a photograph.
I did go back. It was about fifty minutes and she was asleep.
She passed in the January and I had four conversations with her in total and I remember none of them.
I remember the name of the journalist.
And one more, which I have only said out loud once.
When Ferris said she didn’t choose you by accident, the first thing I felt was not shock.
It was relief.
Because for eleven days I had been carrying a low, specific anxiety about whether I had used a dying woman for a photograph. It had been sitting under everything. I had not named it.
And a man in a dark suit handed me an envelope that said: she planned it, she chose you, you were doing what she wanted.
And I felt the weight come off.
That is the true chronology and it is not flattering. I was let off before I was told anything, and I took it.
And I have wondered — properly, not rhetorically — whether she intended that too.
Whether a woman who could time a rota by eleven weeks might also have worked out that the person who posts a photograph of a dying stranger is going to need absolution by about the second week.
The file does not say. Ferris says no, and he knew her for nineteen years, and he says she was not sentimental enough to think about how I would feel afterwards.
I think he is wrong. I think she thought about it for an afternoon and decided it was a reasonable price for me to be paid.
But he knew her and I did not, and I am aware that I want her to have been thinking about me.
It has been four years.
There was money in a second envelope.
There was quite a lot of it and I am not going to say how much, except that it was more than I earn in four years and that I sat on a kitchen floor when I read the figure.
I did not keep it, and I want to be honest that this took nine days and two conversations and was not the instant decision people assume.
I kept the fund running, which is what she asked for in a letter that is one page long and which contains no instructions at all, only a description of how she used to find the names.
She read the local papers. Four of them, every week, for fourteen years, which is about two thousand nine hundred newspapers.
That is the whole method. She read death notices in local papers and then she rang funeral directors and asked, plainly, whether the family were struggling.
It costs nothing to do that. It costs a Sunday morning and the nerve to make the phone call.
The phone call is the whole job. I got it wrong for the first four.
You cannot ring a funeral director and ask whether a family are poor. What you ask — and this is her wording, from the letter, and I have not improved on it — is whether there is anything outstanding on the account.
That is it. Eleven words, in a neutral voice, and the person on the other end will tell you, because they have been carrying it too and nobody ever asks them.
Twice now the answer has been that the family had already sold something.
Twenty-six since I took it on.
Ferris does the paperwork and will not take a fee and is now seventy-four and has told me he intends to die at that desk.
He is the only person alive who knew her properly, and he did her conveyancing in 2006 and her fund from 2011 and he never once asked her why.
I asked him about that in the second year. Whether he had ever wanted to know.
And he said: she was paying me to be the person who did not ask.
