Editor’s Note: Leaving a Trace

“What was he thinking?”

I am sitting across from my father’s tax adviser as she pours over some of the papers I’ve been sorting for the past four months. She is asking the same question I find myself voicing aloud periodically when I just can’t make sense of his filing system, or the beneficiary he named on one of his accounts, or the big gap in record-keeping, or his file-naming habits.

“He was so careful about all these matters, so attentive to details . . . why would he have left it like this?” she asks, and has no better answer than I do, no way other than speculating what might have led my father to do or not do one thing rather than another. We can no longer consult him.

We are trying to sort through his papers, settle accounts, trying to make sure everything is in place to provide my mother with what is needed, to keep her bills paid in a way that relieves her of worry. Everything will, eventually, be fine, I know; everything will settle into place and start running in a (different) kind of routine.

In the days after the funeral, after all the people had gone home, I sat at his desk—handmade from the heaviest light oak he could afford, massive and dense—with the two file drawers open, one on each side of the computer. I sat there trying to figure out where the important papers were, what kinds of things went on which side, which were active files that I needed to make phone calls about first and which were merely records of old accounts. I tried to understand his logic, his thinking.

Eventually I found that in order to make sense of it—so that I could begin to work through each task systematically—I would have to re-label files and order them differently. But for weeks I was loathe to make any changes. Here, after all, was how he had arranged them, and it must have created a picture for him, a kind of sense. No doubt another person would have gone about this differently. But I’m a person who reads, who looks at the arrangement of matter trying to discern a sense-making logic, and so I have spent far too long trying to read my father in his file labels and in the arrangement of his papers and records, trying to conjure him back in this way.

What was he thinking about?

How to make his social security check, the pension he received, and bits and pieces of investments he’d made over time yield sufficiently to take care of my mother. How to give instructions to his grown children that would sustain them, how to get them to do what he wished they’d do without him. He was dealing with regrets. He was enjoying himself, too—with the way email gave him an opportunity to stay in touch with people from his work life, his religious life, his community life. He bought U.S. Mint coins in proof sets. He listened to the catalog of Frank Sinatra albums that he’d managed to upload to the computer. He talked daily to my brother and tried not to dwell on his disappointment at not being able to watch his grandsons play football in person. He tried, too, not to dwell on what ached or didn’t work right, but more and more in the written record he left, you can see it interrupting the care he usually took—even with his two-fingered typing—to get things right.

I know a lot about what he was paying attention to, but not what he made of it all. I also know it’s a privilege to have this text to struggle with. He wasn’t a writer, nor very well-read, but he did at times put words to paper when he wanted to be sure we knew what mattered to him, what moved him. Now that he is no longer here, I look to the traces of himself that he...