There were nine people at the funeral on the tenth of January and I have thought about every single one of them.

I paid for it.

Not extravagantly — a direct burial with a short graveside service at a cemetery in Bloomington, a plot, a marker to come later, and a funeral director named Odessa Krammes who was kind to me in a way I did not know I needed and who let me pay in three instalments without my asking.

Four thousand one hundred dollars.

I did not know, on the tenth of January, that Ramsey County would have done it for nothing, in his own name, with a record and a marked grave, because that is what counties in this state do and because it is not a secret.