His name was Walter Strand.

I did not know that for the first nineteen months I knew him.

I knew him as a man outside a subway entrance on Hennepin Avenue who drank his coffee black, and I spoke to him for five minutes every weekday for two years, and I could not have told you his surname until I had to put it on a form.

Part Two: The Second Sentence

Nobody was going to bury me as a John Doe.

That is the second sentence, and I read it and I put the pages down on my knees and sat in a chair in a coat and could not get any air in.

Because that was the reason.

That was the entire reason, and it was the sentence he had said to me on a frozen pavement on the fourth of December with his hands shaking around a paper cup, and I had believed it inside about four seconds, and I had acted on it eight days later in a building in Saint Paul.

He had told me that a man with no legal family gets disposed of by the county.

That he would go into a system and come out of it as a line in a ledger.

That he did not want to die belonging to nobody.

And here he was, in his own handwriting, on lined yellow paper, six days after I had stood at a graveside in Bloomington, telling me it was not true.

My arrangements were settled.

The county would have handled every form.