Do not turn my dying into another thing you failed to fix.

My hands stopped on the paper.

Because that is precisely what I had been doing for fourteen days.

I had been going back over the yellowing, and whether I should have pushed harder about the clinic in the autumn, and whether a different housing worker in 2022 would have changed the liver of a man who had been drinking since he was nineteen.

I had constructed, without noticing, a project with a failure at the end of it, because that is a shape I can hold, and grief is not.