I spent the time on what mattered.

Jamal, one of the young men from the shelter, the first one my endowment put through his first semester of community college, came and read to me some afternoons — the boy I had taught to sound out words at sixteen, reading aloud to me at nineteen while I dozed, and if you want to know what a life is worth, it is that, it is exactly that, the circle of it closing in a small bright room.

Coretta brought news of the shelter, the deposits paid, the kids housed, the thing I had built already outliving me.

Marva and I told the old stories, the childhood ones, until we laughed and it pulled at nothing because there were no stitches left, only the soft failing of the body, which I do not intend to describe, because it was mine and it was private and it was, in its own way, alright.

I was not afraid the way I had expected to be.

When the fear came, at night, I did what I had always done in hard moments across thirty-four years of teaching: I thought about the children.