Which is true. Every word of it is true. He was sorry.
He just wasn’t sorry for what I thought he was sorry for.
That is the entire story. Everything else is detail.
I was in that hospital five days. Grant handled everything.
He talked to the doctors in the hallway. He talked to my mother. He answered my phone. He told people. He took a stack of forms off the bed and said, don’t, I’ll do those, and I let him, because I could not sit up without help and because a thing had happened to my brain where I could not follow a sentence to the end of it.
Not once in those five days did anyone from that hospital say the word “died” to me.
I have thought about this so much that it’s worn a groove.
What they said was: “I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through.” What they said was: “You’ve had a very hard time.” What they said, standing at the foot of my bed with their hands folded, was, “How are you doing today, Mrs. Dressler,” in a voice with a floor under it.
