What gets me is that all the time I’ve been a hopeful person. I really thought it would add up differently, that something would happen to change it all. I always wanted one shining perfect thing in my life, the one thing no one can have, I suppose.

I hate the thought of my not being there when you died, like I was cheated. Would I have seen you then, Papi, the real you? I remember fantasizing about it, I was waiting for that last minute with you as if it would have explained it all. So much I counted on in that last moment of consciousness, before the last breath. What would you have said to me? Something that was magic like a spell, something that would have made everything different. I was waiting for your words, or even some sign, your squeezing my hand. It was going to be the last chance, and I saw myself with my head on your chest, and we spoke truthfully to one another at the end. I pictured it like that.

Probably I didn’t miss anything by not being there, probably it’s like everything else, death, you wait for transcendence and there isn’t any anywhere, it’s all just chemicals in the brain.

Long after you died, Papi, I persisted in this foolishness, seeking the answer, the magic answer. Searching through correspondence, reading other people’s reviews of your work, looking at the old movies; the more I forgot, the more desperately I searched through whatever was left—as if somehow I’d find something that would have made it all make sense. But it wasn’t there, no critic knew, no one could tell me what I couldn’t remember. Maybe that’s why Mariette’s death was so hard. She was the only one who might have helped to solve the puzzle. And as long as she was alive, I didn’t have to own my memory.

After she died, it was just me looking. Looking without knowing what I was looking for. Sifting through the artifacts like an emotional archaeologist. One tooth, one rib, one knuckle bone from which to reconstruct a life.

Because we all try to make sense of it somehow, don’t we? We have to. That was what the cameras were all about, wasn’t it? Your trying to understand the world. Because there is no sense that isn’t fabricated, no inherent meaning. Life has no meaning other than what we give it.

When Doris and I talked late that autumn night—my thirtieth birthday and she had toasted me to the point of philosophy—we talked about existentialism. I could tell she disapproved, she said the names Sartre and Camus as if she felt a little sorry for them, their loneliness. I was scared listening to her, frightened by evidence of her faith, because what they said has always made sense to me.

I’ve always wanted so much to believe and when I don’t and look back on my periods of faith as delusions—necessary delusions, but still—I see that they were a gift to me, maybe from myself, but a needed gift, and who knew better than I what I needed? Who cares if God exists? The people who believe it are better off for doing so. Einstein said his sense of God was his sense of wonder at the universe. You’d think he, anyway, would have been smart enough to figure it out. But perhaps from where he was looking everything was orderly and beautiful, like seeing farms and fields from the window of a plane.

I don’t wish I had a chance to do it all over with you, Papi, but I wish we had been different people who would have done it right. Some people’s lives seem better than others, they live them more cleanly or something. And if life only has the meaning one gives it, then I’ve made a mess of it all, haven’t I? The love that I have, Carl’s, Doris’s, I’ve wasted while trying to figure out what happened with you. Just as other years were wasted trying to trick you into loving me.

I tried to make it up to you, but I never could have been good enough to make up for killing Mother. That’s what you blamed me for, isn’t it? Merely by existing, I stole her and ruined your happiness.

Another man, more generous, would have reacted differently; another man, a man like Carl, would have become devoted to his daughter because she preserved her mother’s essence. But you couldn’t do that; you were lacking one necessary talent; you were unable to translate suffering into love.