Nobody decided old men should die on their kitchen floors.

It just falls out, quietly, at the bottom of a column, as the unpriced consequence of a thousand reasonable decisions made by decent people looking at numbers that couldn’t show them Emmitt.

That is the world we are building, not on purpose, one spreadsheet at a time — a world that is cheaper and faster and lonelier every year, in which the seeing, the coming, the daily proof that a person still exists, shows up nowhere in the accounts because we have never learned to count it, and so we let it go, cluster box by cluster box, and call the going progress.

I have carried that route for thirty-one years, and I am here to tell you the seeing was the cargo.

The letters were just the reason they let me drive.

Chapter 9 — Telling Them