My Father Was Dying When He Did It
I did the math sitting in that chair.
My father was diagnosed in the fall of 1985. He died in February of 1987.
So he made that drive while he was sick. While he knew.
Jeffrey told me my father had spent a year regretting that letter. That he’d started to understand what he’d taken.
And he gave Jeffrey the wooden box.
What Was in the Letters
The bundle underneath the ring was letters my father wrote to my mother in 1962 and 1963. Before they married.
Because Erica Bartos’s father had not approved of Thomas Ballard. At all. He’d told my mother she was making a mistake she’d spend her life paying for, and he’d told her so for two years.
She married him anyway.
Forty-nine years, until my father died in that house.
“If He Had Listened Then, I Wouldn’t Exist”
That’s what I said out loud in that hospital room.
