She could have had her attorney draft something.

She could have dictated it, typed it, made it clean and legal and easy to read.

Instead she took up a pen with a hand that trembled, and she spent what must have been a long and tiring effort forming each letter herself, because some things lose their meaning if a machine makes them, and she knew it.

The shakiness of the writing is part of what it says.

It is the visible record of an old woman spending her failing strength to speak to me directly, in her own hand, with no one in between.