If this is being read, then I've gone, and there are some things my children don't know, and I want them told by me and not about me.
In August of 2018 I got lost driving home from the yard. Not turned around. Lost. I sat in a car park on Hanley Street for about forty minutes and I could not work out which way the house was, and I had been driving that road since 1971.
There were other things before that. I'd stopped being able to do the invoices. I'd said some things to Corrine at the front desk that were not like me and I couldn't tell you now what they were.
The person who made me go to the doctor was Seraphine. She made the appointment herself and she drove me and she sat in the car park while I was in there.
On the second of October, 2018, at Halvard Regional, I was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
The room made a sound.
I want you to understand: two hundred people, and my brother and I sitting in the fourth row, and the entire building made a noise at once.
They told me what it does. It is not the kind where you forget names first. It is the kind where you stop being the man you were, in front of everybody, over about six years, and you are aware of it for the first part.
They gave me a range. I have outlasted it, which the doctors tell me happens.
Sybil, Lucan — I did not tell you. That was my decision, it was made in October of 2018 in a car park while I was still capable of making it, and I would make it again.
You had your own children and your own lives four hundred miles away. If I had told you in 2018 you would have come home and you would have spent six years managing me. I did not want to be managed by my children. I wanted to be your father for as long as I could manage it and then be gone.
I know what that cost you. I'm sorry. It was my life and it was the last decision I got to make with a clear head and I made it.
I asked Seraphine to marry me on the ninth of November, 2018.
She said no. She said no twice.
She said no because she knew exactly what I was asking her for, which was to give me the next six years of her life, and because she said — and this is a direct quote — "your kids will think I did this for the money and I will never be able to prove otherwise."
So I had Prue Vandenberg draw up an agreement, and Seraphine signed it on the thirtieth of November, 2018, and it has been in Prue's office ever since.
Under that agreement my wife takes nothing from my estate. Not the house on Alder Street, not the business, not the accounts, not the proceeds of Vireo Lake. Nothing but her own personal property and her own car.
She asked for that. I did not offer it and I argued against it for three weeks.
Everything I have goes to my two children and my four grandchildren, as it was always going to, and as it was arranged in 2018 before a single thing in that house had been repainted.
Bertrand Ozel stopped reading there and had a drink of water. He needed it. He'd been at school with my father.
I was not really in the room by that point.
Some other things, since I'm being tidy.
The house. I asked her to redo it. I asked her in January of 2019. I could not walk into that kitchen. Your mother was in every square foot of that house and I was losing my mind in it, and I asked my wife to change every room I couldn't be in, and she did it in eight months and she cried doing the hall.
The lake house. In July of 2021 I took the boat out at four in the morning without telling anybody and I do not remember any of it. Ken Faraday found me and brought me in and did not report it, and I want that noted because he did me a kindness.
The house sold in September on the advice of Prue Vandenberg and a care manager named Delia Rowntree, and every dollar of it went into a trust that has paid for four years of home care, respite, and a night nurse three nights a week since 2023.
It is all documented and the trust accounts are with Prue and I would like my children to read them.
Sybil, you did not speak to me for two months over that sale. I remember. It was worth it to me not to tell you why, and I would like you to sit with the fact that I chose two months of silence from you over one hour of the truth, because that is how badly I did not want you to know.
I put my hands over my face at that point and my daughter, who is twelve, put her hand on my back.
The funeral.
I chose all of it, at Ozel's, on the fourteenth of January, 2019, while I still could.
The flowers are white stock and eucalyptus because that is what your mother had, and I sat in this room in 2018 and could not tell you what marigolds were called.
That's what did it. Not the diagnosis. That sentence.
The music is a cello piece your mother played on a record in 1994 in a flat on Bracken Row before either of you were born, and I have never been able to describe it to anybody, so I brought the record in and Bertrand's son found it.
The photograph is one your mother took at Vireo in 1998. I am looking at her. That is the only reason I chose it and it is the only reason I have ever liked it.
My wife did not choose one single thing about today. Everything you are looking at is mine and it is six and a half years old.
She has spent this week being told by my family that she has picked all the wrong things, and she has not defended herself once, because I asked her not to explain any of it and she has kept every promise she ever made me, including the ones I should not have asked for.
That's the last thing. I asked her to keep this from you. She did. For six and a half years. She has been called a great many things in her own kitchen by my son and she has never once opened her mouth, because I told her not to.
If you are angry about that, be angry with me. I'm not there. It's easier.
The final paragraph was four lines.
Sybil, Lucan — I know exactly what you thought and I do not blame you for it. From where you were standing it was the obvious answer and it took no effort at all, and that is what worries me.
