Then he said something else, which is the most useful sentence anybody has given me about any of this.
He said: there are people who only know how to be close to somebody through a piece of paper. She was one. I am another. You are not, which is why she chose you and not me.
And in four years I have never once let anybody know who I am.
Not because I am humble. I am not remotely humble; I posted a photograph of a dying woman at twenty past eight on a Tuesday.
I do it that way because she did, and because I have come to understand that the anonymity was never about modesty for her either.
It was so she never had to find out what those women thought of her.
I am doing the same thing. I am just doing it on purpose now.
Her family and I have spoken. Three times, and the third one was better than the first two.
They have their own account of 1981 and it does not match hers in several places and I have decided that is allowed.
Her niece did most of the talking. She is fifty-four and she was born after Wilhelmina left, so she has never met her at all.
And the thing she said that I was not prepared for was this.
She said: we looked. For about fifteen years. My grandmother had somebody looking.
There is a version of this story where a family cuts a woman off, and there is a version where a woman goes and cannot be found, and both families always believe the first one.
Wilhelmina thought nobody came after her.
Somebody came after her for fifteen years and did not find her, because she was extremely good at not being findable, because she had been practising since she was twenty-six.
I have not been able to decide whether I am glad she never knew that. Most days I am.
The photograph is still up. I have thought about taking it down about forty times.
It stays because a woman waited eleven weeks for a Thursday to get it taken.
And because of one thing her niece said at the end of the third conversation, when we had both stopped being careful.
She asked to see it. Not on a phone — printed.
So I had it printed, and I took it to her house in the November, and she looked at it for a long time at a kitchen table.
And then she said: she’s got my grandmother’s hands.
That photograph has been seen by something like four hundred thousand people, for about nine seconds each, and one person has ever looked at it and seen a family.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a young woman who gave a dying stranger the day of her life.
I did give it to her. That afternoon was real, the dress was real, and when she held her hand up she was not performing for anybody.
But she arranged the whole of it, and she arranged me, and the only part I contributed on my own was the part I did not ask permission for.
If you are doing something kind for somebody who cannot ask you for much —
ask them the small thing anyway.
Ask them before you tell anyone. Ask them while they can still say no.
Because a person at the end of their life has usually stopped being able to request things, and has not stopped having preferences, and the gap between those two is exactly the size of whatever you decide to do with them.
She wanted it posted. I got lucky.
Eleven words would have made it hers instead of mine.
I had them. She was forty feet down a corridor and awake, and the light was on, and I know it was on because I walked past the door.
I have thought about that walk about four hundred times, and the truthful thing is that I did not decide not to ask her.
I simply did not think of it. It never came up in my own head as an option.
That is worse than deciding, and it is what most of us actually do, and it is why I have written all of this down.
