Part 24
Part 24 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
The hardest part was not the living. It was the telling.
We made a list. That sounds cold and it was the only way either of us could do it. Sixteen names, and next to each one a note about how much they had cried at a funeral for a boy who was not dead.
I made forty phone calls between the end of January and the middle of March, and here is what I learned about people, which I did not want to learn and cannot unlearn.
About half were extraordinary. My mother’s friend Bernice, who is eighty one and sang in the choir with her for thirty years, listened to the whole thing and said, “Well, thank God,” and then, “Now what does he need?” and then showed up eight days later with a slow cooker and a card and did not ask me one single question about diagnoses.
My cousin Michelle, who I would have bet money on, has not spoken to me since. Not because of Danny. Because of the lie. Because she gave the reading at his funeral, she stood up at St. Albert’s at twenty two years old and read from Ecclesiastes for a casket with a photograph on it, and she cannot get past having been made a fool of, and I understand it, and it has cost me my cousin.
Four people asked me, in the first three minutes, whether he was dangerous.
One of them was a priest.
Uncle Rich, Patty’s husband, did not say anything at all on the phone. He came over two Saturdays later with a toolbox and put a second handrail on the garage stairs because the one that was there was loose, and he worked for two hours, and he shook Danny’s hand, and he left. He has done something like that every month since. He has never once discussed it.
And Patty and I did not speak for six weeks, and then we did, and we are not what we were, and I have made my peace with that.
What surprised me most was the paperwork.
You cannot simply be alive again. There is a process, and it is administered by people who have mostly never done it. You need a court order to vacate a presumptive death finding. You need the doctor, and the hospital records from Columbus from 2015, and a probate judge, and a lawyer who costs money, and you need the person themselves to sit in a room with strangers and answer questions about the worst year of his life while a clerk types.
It took fourteen months.
On the day the order came through, Danny was issued a state ID card with his photograph on it, and he looked at it for a long time in the car in the parking lot of the BMV on Woodman.
“It’s got the wrong middle initial,” he said.
“Are you serious?”
“It’s got a P. I’m not a P.”
“Danny, we have been at this for fourteen months.”
“I’m just telling you what it says,” my brother said, and put it in his wallet, which he did not have before, and which I had bought him, and which he has carried every day since.