List-making.

You make a list.

You categorize the items. For clarity.

These, for dealing with the remains that housed your father once but are no longer him. For providing the last decencies and dignities of death, even though death is the least decent or dignified thing you can think of. There are more tasks involved in this than you realized.

You make subheadings to keep track.

Those, for arranging the basic decencies of life for your mother. The survivor, as they say in obituaries. (Writing the obituary is also on your list.) She needs an income. Insurance. Medical care. She has cancer and just had brain surgery: she needs stability. Emotional stability you can't give her. But you bring her a walker from when you had your own crippling surgery and make sure there are easily prepared foods in the house, that her far too many medications are labeled clearly. You ask about installing bars in her shower. You buy her a new case for her phone, one that is sturdy enough not to shatter if her trembling hands drop it.

You think how convenient it would be to have such protection for yourself.

These, for telling everyone else, over and over, that your father is dead. So many people must be notified when someone dies. You've gotten it down to a brief few sentences. It comes like clockwork.

Those, for all the papers you must collect, so many papers, testifying in one way or another that your father is dead. This one stating what he was doing in those last moments before the car accident that ultimately stole him from you. These three resigning the wreckage of that car to someone else. This dozen, to claim the sum his insurance company has decided his life was worth.

You make sub-sub-categories for this to keep everything straight.

You remember the sub-sub-librarian in Moby-Dick and a conversation you had with your father trying to explain why it's your favorite book. You cannot remember anything he said in return, but you remember the inimitable lift of his eyebrows.

You make another list, this of things you want to check on but that are less pressing. Metastatic endometrial cancer survival rates. Non-chemo cancer treatment options. Home care resources for the elderly. Wrongful death suits.

Wrongful death.

Is there a rightful death, you wonder? It doesn't feel as though there can be.

You look up the etymology of the word orphan. It's Greek. You remember a recent conversation with a friend who reminded you that pharmakon, another Greek word, means both remedy and poison. You note that pharmakos means scapegoat, someone sacrificed to move evil away from the community, to restore it after disaster.

You think how convenient that would be, too.

You make a list because you're good at lists. You add items, recategorize, bring them into order, strike them through with an assured sweep of the pen when you've completed them.

The list is comfort.

The list is distraction.

The list is control.

You think, I should ask Dad how best to organize all this information because he's brilliant at databases.

You remember you can't ask him.

The list is pain.

The list is focus.

The list is what you have left and when it's completed you will have no more tasks and no more people to notify and you will have to go on with your life, remembering only your side of conversations with your father and having to answer your own questions.

You start another list.