The Day of a Death, the First Thing that Changes Is What You Want from Strangers

The in-the-way hospital chaplain says he wants to give you a memory book in honor of the deceased—who is stretched out all of three feet away—but he needs help filling out the dedication page. You want to say in your most polite-but-really-sarcastic voice, "This room is currently for people who know the deceased's name, so take your nonsense book and surely good intentions and come back in forty minutes, when she's been dead an hour." But in reality you say nothing. You want him to notice that you are ignoring him. Because she is right in front of you and looks so small in the papery gown, and you were just talking to her last night, and you should have asked her any question more important than how she was feeling.

And an hour later, the hospital becomes a place where you're not. Down the street full of sleeping neighbors, you take her guide dog for a walk. (It doesn't have to be done, but it's something.) You want the neighbors to wake and retrieve their morning papers, so they could see you and the collie. When you said good morning, it would mean, "Don't you see? I'm walking her dog because she isn't here anymore. Don't you see, when I flew in to visit, she was perfectly healthy, and then she wasn't." But mostly you want them to draw their black curtains, say, "Have mercy, he's walking her dog. Let's leave him be."

And later you want the high-school girl behind the counter at the sandwich shop to forgive you for being hungry at a time like this. Want the DJ overhead to switch off "Happy Christmas, War is Over" because it reminds you that war is not over, that people are dying midthought on every line of longitude around the globe—that children and lovers bear the burden of remembering completely alone. And you wonder if this is selfish, if you are stealing army widows' grief for your own, and that makes you wish the sandwich girl would quit asking such hard questions.

You call relatives who you wish you knew better and say, "I hate to be the bearer of bad news," like it's a Tuesday morning and you're telling your coworkers the copy machine is broken. And you have no explanation to the question they're surely thinking: why is it you standing beside the clear blue vase, looking up their phone numbers in her giant print address book? Why you're the one leaning against the Swiss carving and its story you always meant to ask about. Why one of them, someone more deserving of sharing her last conversation—someone who in fact had probably planned it in their heads for years—is not there. Your aunt has driven in, and you hate her husband for staying out of town, for leaving her alone, for forcing you to fill in for him. And you want all of them to understand that you do care, it's just that you're not a person who ever cries.

And the lawn man has to be called and paid, and Meals on Wheels wants to know if they should bring today's soup, and your immediate family hasn't even phoned to double check if you're all right, and before sunrise just this morning you saw a corpse outside a casket for the first time in your life, and through the window a church girl is bawling into your aunt's sleeve, and the postal worker has the audacity to bring junk mail, and the telephone is ringing again.

You want a megaphone like a defense weapon. You want to point it at everyone like a gun and shout, "Go away, go away!" But no one listens to what you can't say, so you are the one to leave.

The cab driver asks only where you want him to take you—he...