That is all. One tick, in pencil, in the margin, next to my mother's name in a newspaper.
I sat in a car park for about forty minutes with that page and I could not work out what I was feeling, and I have since decided it was being on a list.
Somebody had gone through a very great many of those notices for fourteen years, and my mother had received a tick, and eleven years later so had I.
She picked me off the hospice volunteer list eleven weeks before we ever met.
I have the date she requested the list. It is in that file, because Ferris put it there, because he wanted me to be able to check every single thing he was about to tell me.
Eleven weeks. She waited eleven weeks for a Thursday where I would be on the rota for her wing.
She could have asked for me. That is the thing.
A patient in that building can request a particular volunteer and it is written on a form and it takes about four days.
She did not, because a request goes on a file, and a file gets read by a manager, and a manager would have asked why.
So a woman with months left chose to spend eleven weeks of them waiting for a rota to do it on its own.
That is either extraordinary patience or it is a person who has spent forty years making sure nothing about her can ever be traced back, and it is obviously the second one, and the second one is not admirable — it is a habit.
She could not stop doing it even when the thing she was hiding was a kindness.
Here is why.
Eleven years ago my mother passed. It was quick and it was in the January and we were not ready in any sense of the word, including financially.
My father had been gone four years. There were three of us and none of us had anything.
We could not pay for the funeral. I want to say that plainly, because it is the single most shameful week of my family's life and we have never once discussed it out loud since.
And then a small trust covered every penny of it.
The funeral director told us it was handled. No name. No letter. Nobody ever made contact, and I rang twice in the February to try and thank somebody and got nowhere both times.
For eleven years I have assumed it was a church charity.
It was her.
One woman, running one fund, for fourteen years, for women she never met, out of a two-bedroom flat with a rented television in it.
Eleven of them, in total. I have the list. The earliest is 2010.
They are all women and they are all in the same three postcodes and eight of the eleven had children under sixteen.
That is the pattern and it took me about four minutes to see it, and about a year to understand what it meant.
She was not picking people at random from a newspaper.
She was picking her own mother, eleven times, in 1983, over and over, with money she did not have then and did have later.
Nobody has told me that. There is nothing in the file that says it. It is the only thing in this entire account that I have worked out entirely on my own, and I am fairly sure of it, and I will never be able to check.
PART 4
And she was not alone by accident either.
She has a family. They are still living.
Two of them were at that graveside, and I did not know who they were, and one of them is the man in his sixties who did not speak to anybody.
She is the one who left.
In 1981, at twenty-six, for reasons that are set out in four lines in her own handwriting and that are hers and that I am not going to put here.
They are not dramatic. That is what I will say about them.
There is no crime in those four lines and nobody in that family did anything that would make a story.
It is the ordinary kind — a disagreement, a position taken, a silence that went on slightly too long to be broken easily, and then a year, and then a decade.
She never went back.
And that fund is what she did instead of going back.
Fourteen years of paying for funerals for women she had never met, because there was one in her own family in 1983 that she did not attend.
Her mother's. In the March of that year.
She was twenty-eight and she was four hours away and she did not go, and she has written four lines about that too, and those four lines are the only place in thirty-one pages where her handwriting changes.
There are two words crossed out. Heavily, several times, so that neither Ferris nor I can read them.
A woman who kept a file on a stranger for two years, and who left instructions for a fund, and who planned a wedding from a bed — and the only thing in the whole of it she could not leave standing was two words about her own mother.
That is the actual shape of this and it is not the shape anybody wants.
And then the part that took the ground out from under me a second time, and that I did not understand until about three in the morning.
She knew I would post the photograph.
She chose somebody who would.
There is a page in that file — page nineteen — which is a printout of my own social media from two years before we met.
It is not creepy. It is four lines of notes in her handwriting and one of them says: posts everything. good.
Two words in that line have stayed with me longer than anything else in thirty-one pages.
Not posts everything. That is just observation, and it is accurate, and I have since deleted about two hundred things.
Good.
