And a woman named Sister Perpetua, ninety-one, still living, who is in the notebook not as a patient but as one of two people Alden mentions by name in the margins — a hosp*ce nun who worked the same nights he did from 1996 to 2004 and who, when I found her, said, “Oh, the tab man. Is he de*d?” and then cried for ten minutes and then made me tea.
PART 5 — FINAL
Here is what I did with the bag.
Not a museum.
Not an art installation, which two people suggested and which made me want to throw something.
In October, fourteen months after Alden d*ed, I rented the community room of a public library and put eleven hundred and forty pull tabs on eleven hundred and forty index cards, and on each card I wrote a date, a name, and three words.“Then start tonight. You’re on shift tonight?”
“Eleven to seven.”
“Buy a notebook on the way in. Date, name, and the truest thing they say. That’s the whole system, it cost him four dollars in 1979, and you’ll have thirty of them by Christmas.”
He bought a notebook.
I know because he sent me a photograph of the first page eleven days later, and it says a date, and a name, and: “He wants somebody to know he never learned to read and he ran a crew for twenty years anyway.”
He’s up to two hundred and six.
There are nine people now.
Nine, that I know of — a paramedic, two hosp*ce nurses, a night-shift chaplain, a woman in another state who read about it and started her own, and four volunteers on my program — all of them keeping a notebook, all of them asking the question, none of them collecting pull tabs because that was Marguerite’s and Alden’s and belongs to 1983.
Nobody finishes another man’s list.
They start their own.
That’s what he actually left me, and it took me two years to see it: not a bag and not a notebook, but a system so cheap and so simple that a boiler mechanic invented it in one night and any tired person on any night shift can run it with a drugstore notebook and one question.
The thirty-one families took their cards home.
The other eleven hundred and nine are in a case at the hosp*ce where he volunteered longest, in the family lounge, where people wait — because Sister Perpetua said, at ninety-one, with total certainty, “Not a wall, dear. A room where people are sitting. They need something to read at three in the morning that isn’t a magazine.”
