THE ONES WE CARRY WITH US

When writing fiction, it is as much about what you leave out as what you leave in. Writing a police statement seemed the same.

- SARA O’LEARY

A FEW YEARS AGO, I accidentally midwifed a death. She was an elderly woman who had lived alone for many years, and though her death should, on some level, have been expected, it came as a shock to me. Her name was Agatha, but she told me once that she’d had another name given to her by her grandfather because Agatha was an old family name and had already belonged to too many people.

At Agatha’s funeral, I would learn what her secret name was, and it would make me sad because, the whole time she was dying, I was calling out the name I knew. She was getting further and further away, and it wasn’t that I thought she would come back but just that I wanted her to know I was still there. But I was calling her by the name that had already been worn out when it reached her.

FOR A WHILE, I volunteered at a seniors’ centre where most of the clients had dementia. I became very fond of a woman named Marjorie, who was in her nineties but was more alive than most people I knew. Marjorie was convinced that we’d been schoolmates. “Chummed around together” was how she put it. I’d get her to tell me stories and then, the next time I saw her, I’d remind her of things we had done together when we were both at boarding school in Rothesay, New Brunswick. Sometimes we would talk about what it had been like at McGill just after the war. The larks we’d gotten up to. It was all lies, of course. But it was also true.