I am writing this from a bed at the hospice on Peach Street, which you might know, it is about four blocks from where it happened. I didn't pick it for that. It's just where the good one is. Erie is a small town that thinks it's a city, and you can't get away from anything here, you just learn to drive around it.
They tell me I have a couple of weeks, so I will be quick, and I will not be nice, because I have never once been nice to you and I don't intend to start on my deathbed and confuse everybody.
I have not forgiven you. I want you to know that first, so you don't read the rest of this and get the wrong idea. I have not forgiven you every day for twenty-two years. I have not forgiven you on the anniversary or on Kieran's birthday or on any Sunday in the fall. I did not forgive you when Eamon gave up State College. I did not forgive you when Lark had to sleep in my bed until she was ten. I did not forgive you when she moved to Ohio, which I know is not your fault, but I blamed you anyway, because it was easier than blaming her or me.
But I have to tell you something, and you're the only one I can tell, which is a joke God is playing on both of us. Some days I did. Not many. Some. There were days I opened your envelope and read about the heron at the Bayfront or the lady next door's walk you shoveled, and got to the bottom where it said still sober, and something in my chest let go for about an hour. I don't know what to call that. I'm not going to call it forgiving you. But it was not nothing, and I would be a liar if I went into the ground and let you think it was nothing.
I never cashed your money orders. I want you to know it wasn't to spite you. I couldn't take money for Kieran. It would have been like selling him. But I couldn't throw them away either, because each one meant you were alive and you were sober, and if you were sober then something came out of it. Something besides a grave and two kids without a father. I needed something to come out of it. God help me, you were the only thing that could.
There's one more thing, and then I'm done, and then I'm going to have the nurse bring me some ginger ale.
I read the police report. You know the part. I read it more times than I'm going to say. For years I hated that part more than any other part. I hated that it was you who held her. I hated that the last kindness anyone did my daughter that day came from the man who did it to her. I hated it so much I never told anyone how much.
But my daughter grew up and became a person who talks strangers through the worst minutes of their lives. She does it every night in Columbus, Ohio, in a room full of screens, in a headset. I listened to her once. They let me sit in. A woman called whose husband had fallen off a ladder, and Lark told her where to look. She said it the way you said it. She doesn't know where she got it. I have never had the courage to tell her. Maybe Eamon will, or maybe he won't, he's like his father, he'll decide what's right and then torture himself doing it.
So that's what I wanted you to know. Some of what you put in her that day was terrible and some of it was not. I don't get to choose which parts she kept. Neither do you.
Stop sending the money. I mean it this time. Spend it on bus fare to a meeting, or on a decent coat. You can keep writing if you want to. Eamon will have the box. He won't write back. Don't hold it against him. He has been carrying this since he was seventeen, and I let him, because I was weak, and that is the one thing in all of this I'm sure was my fault and not yours.
Stay sober.