Somebody looked at the most thoughtless habit I have — the one I would list if you asked me what I like least about myself — and wrote good next to it in pencil, because it was useful to her.
I have never been recruited for a quality before. Certainly not for that one.
Because after a lifetime of being a person nobody could find, she wanted to be seen. Once. By a great many people.
And she needed somebody who would do it without asking her, because asking her would have meant her having to say it out loud, and a woman who left in 1981 and never went back is not a woman who can say I would like to be looked at to another human being.
That ceremony was not a gift I gave her.
It was a job she gave me, and she chose well, and she never once had to ask.
And I did it beautifully, and I did it for free, and I thought the whole thing was my idea.
I have been asked whether that makes me angry.
It did, for about three weeks, and then it stopped, and what replaced it is harder to name.
Because here is the thing about being managed by a dying woman: she did not make me do anything I did not want to do.
She did not manipulate me into kindness. She identified a person who would already have done it, and then made sure that person was in the room.
That is not a con. That is casting.
And what actually stings is not that she used me. It is that she was right about me in under ninety minutes, and that being right about me did not take any effort at all.
PART 5
Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
I posted that photograph without asking her.
She was forty feet away down a corridor. She was awake. I could have walked in and said: shall I put this up?
Eleven words.
I told myself she would love it. She probably would have. The file suggests she would have.
But I did not ask, and the only person who could actually answer was gone by the time it mattered, and she would have wanted it is the sentence people say about the dead when they have already done the thing.
I do not know what that woman wanted.
I know what I wanted, and I know how good it looked, and I posted it at twenty past eight on a Tuesday evening and I checked it before bed.
And at twenty to two in the morning.
And at ten past seven, before work, on the way to the bus.
I want that in here because everybody who has heard this story has been generous about the posting and nobody has asked about the checking.
The posting is arguably a judgement call. The checking is not.
There is no version of refreshing a photograph of a dying woman at twenty to two in the morning that is about the dying woman.
And it goes further than that.
After that day I became the volunteer who arranged the wedding.
That is a real thing that happened to me and it took about nine days. People at the hospice started introducing me that way. Somebody from a local paper rang the office.
I had eleven other patients in that building that year.
I can remember three of their names. I have tried to do it as an exercise, sitting down, with a pen, and I get to three and then nothing.
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.
