“‘When I go, I want it to be a person and not a volunteer. Sato, listen to me: I have sat in eleven hundred rooms and every one of those people had a stranger at the end and I was the stranger and it was not enough. It’s better than nothing. It is not enough. What they wanted was somebody who was theirs. So if there’s a way — if some person is willing — I would like the last hand to belong to somebody with a legal document that says she’s mine. Not because it means anything to the state. Because I have spent forty-six years watching people d*e as somebody’s stranger and I would like to go as somebody’s husband. That’s the whole ask. Don’t make it complicated.'”Mr. Sato put the paper down.
“He didn’t marry you to give you something,” he said. “He married you because after eleven hundred and thirty-nine strangers he had a professional opinion about what a person needs at the end, and he wanted it for himself, and he was too proud to ask anyone for anything except that.”
I asked Mr. Sato the other question then.
The one I’d been carrying since the parking garage.
“Why was he alone? A man who did that for forty-six years — how does he end up in a room with nobody?”
Mr. Sato looked at his desk for a while.
“There was a wife,” he said. “Nineteen seventy-six to nineteen eighty-two. Her name was Dorothy and she left him, and I met her once, in 1993, over a property matter, and she said something to me that I did not understand until I was much older.”
“What did she say?”
“She said: ‘He’s at the hospital.'” Mr. Sato took off his glasses again. “That’s all. I’d asked how he was and she said ‘he’s at the hospital’ in a tone I’d describe as — Willa, she wasn’t bitter. She was tired. Six years of a husband who came home at two in the morning smelling like a ward, who could tell you the name of a stranger’s daughter in Ellisbrook and forgot her birthday twice.”
“He chose it.”
“He chose it every night for forty-six years, one night at a time, which is not the same as choosing it once and is much harder to argue with.” He turned a paperweight over. “There were no children. His brother d*ed in 2004. And the people who knew him best were, by an enormous margin, people who were de*d — because he’d met eleven hundred of them at the most honest moment of their lives and every one of them had told him something true, and after a few decades of that I suspect ordinary conversation was very difficult for him.”
