The Last Page

I've been dying for six months now. Long enough to get used to the idea. Long enough to start sorting through what I'm leaving behind.

Most of it doesn't matter. The house will go to my sister's children. The books to the university library, where they'll sit unread on shelves until someone with sense throws them away. The everyday tokens, the ones I collected over fifty years of practice, I've already distributed to students who needed them more than I do.

But the journal. That's the problem.

My nephew David arrived on Tuesday with flowers and ambition. He's good at hiding the second thing but I've been reading people too long to miss it.

"You're looking better, Aunt Eleanor."

"I'm not. Sit down."

He sat. The flowers went on the bedside table where they'd wilt within a week, just like me.

"I've been thinking about your work," he said. "Your research on place-memory accumulation. The patterns you identified."

"Have you."

"It shouldn't be lost. When you—" He caught himself. "It shouldn't be lost."

"And you'd like to preserve it."

"I could publish it. Under your name, of course. Make sure people remember what you contributed."

I watched his face while he talked. David had always been hungry. Good family, good training, every advantage a young practitioner could want. But underneath all that polish there was a hollow spot. A wanting that had nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with being seen.

He'd publish my research, sure. Put his name next to mine. Edit out the parts that didn't fit the narrative he was building. Use my life's work as a stepping stone to something grander.

I wasn't angry about it. That's just who he was.

"I'll think about it," I said.

Sarah came by on Thursday. She always comes on Thursdays. Has been coming every Thursday for three years, since she moved in next door with her mother and I caught her trying to read the saturation in my garden wall.

"You're looking tired," she said.

"I'm dying. It's tiring work."

She smiled at that. Sarah was seventeen and had no business understanding my sense of humor, but she did. She understood a lot of things she had no business understanding.

"I brought soup. Mom made it."

"Your mother makes terrible soup."

"I know. But she wanted to do something."

We sat together while I pretended to eat the soup. Sarah didn't try to fill the silence with chatter. Didn't ask about my work or my legacy or what I planned to do with the things I was leaving behind. She just sat with me.

After a while she said, "The garden's different today. Heavier."

"I've been contributing more. While I still can."

"Does it hurt?"

"Giving something of yourself always hurts a little. That's how you know it's real."

She nodded like that made perfect sense. Like I'd said something obvious instead of something I'd spent forty years figuring out.

The journal was in my desk drawer where it had always been. Three hundred pages of handwritten notes. Not research. Not theory. Just... me. What I'd felt and learned and failed to understand across five decades of practice.

There was power in it. Saturation from all those hours of concentrated thought. I could feel it humming when I touched the leather cover.

Most practitioners make tokens from objects they find. A stone from a significant place. A tool used during important work. But you can saturate something new if you spend enough time with it, pour enough of yourself into it.

I'd been writing in this journal since I was Sarah's age. It was the most personal thing I owned. The only token I'd made entirely from my own life.

I had to decide what happened to it.

David came back on Sunday. He'd brought papers this time, not flowers.

"I've drafted a proposal," he said. "For archiving your research collection. The Wexler Foundation has funding for this kind of preservation work."

I took the papers. My hands shook. Everything shook these days.

"You've been busy."

"I want to make sure this is handled properly. Before—" He stopped again. He was never going to get comfortable with the word dying. "I care about your legacy, Aunt Eleanor."

"Do you."

"Of course."

"What about my journal?"

Something flickered across his face. Surprise that I'd mentioned it. Then a too-casual smoothing of his expression.

"I didn't know you kept a journal."

"Fifty years. Every week."

"That would be invaluable. For understanding the context of your other work."

"It's personal."

"Of course. I wouldn't share anything sensitive. Just the professional insights."

I looked at him. Really looked. Drew just a little from the house around us, all those years of living soaked into the walls, and let it sharpen my perception.

David was scared. Not of my dying, though that was there too. He was scared of being ordinary. Of doing competent work that nobody remembered. Of ending up like all the other practitioners from good families who never quite became what they promised to be.

He wanted my journal because he thought it would make him significant by association.

"I'll think about it," I said again.

Sarah found me in the garden on Wednesday. I was sitting on the bench my husband built forty years ago, holding the journal in my lap.

"What's that?"

"Everything I know. Everything I am. More or less."

She sat next to me. Didn't reach for the journal. Didn't ask questions. Just sat there while the late afternoon light turned the air golden.

"I have to decide who gets it," I said. "When I'm gone."

"That sounds hard."

"My nephew wants it. He'd use it to advance his career. Quote from it in papers. Become known as the keeper of Eleanor Hartwell's work."

"Is that bad?"

I thought about it. "Not exactly. He'd preserve it. Keep it in circulation. Make sure people read it."

"But?"

"But he doesn't understand it. He'd take what's useful and miss what matters."

Sarah was quiet for a minute. Then she said, "What matters?"

Nobody had ever asked me that. Not in fifty years of teaching and researching and supposedly being an expert.

"The learning," I said finally. "Not the knowledge. The learning. The process of not understanding something and then slowly, painfully, starting to. The mistakes that teach you more than the successes. The questions that never get answered but become more interesting the longer you carry them."

"Oh."

"My nephew wants the answers. He'd strip out all the wondering and keep the conclusions."

"That sounds lonely. For the journal, I mean."

I looked at her. Seventeen years old. Barely trained. No family connections, no advantages, nothing but raw sensitivity and the kind of mind that thought a journal could be lonely.

"Sarah. Do you want it?"

Her eyes went wide. "What?"

"The journal. Do you want it?"

"I couldn't—that's—I don't—"

"I'm not asking if you deserve it. I'm asking if you want it."

She looked at the journal in my lap. I could feel her sensing it. Feeling the weight of saturation inside.

"Yes," she whispered. "I want to know what you wondered about. I want to carry your questions."

I worked on the binding that night. Sat up past midnight with the journal open and my hands pressed flat against the pages.

Contributing isn't complicated. You just give what you have. Pour it in. Let go.

I gave the journal my last year of questions. Why does saturation pool in some objects and not others? What happens to the pieces of yourself you contribute when you die? Is there something on the other side of this, or just nothing?

I gave it my fear of the answers. My hope that I was wrong about the nothing.

I gave it my love for the work. Fifty years of waking up curious and going to sleep satisfied. Not because I'd found answers but because I'd spent another day looking.

When I finished, the journal was warm in my hands.

David came back on Friday. I let him make his pitch again. Nodded in the right places. Thanked him for caring.

Then I told him no.

"Aunt Eleanor—"

"My research papers go to the Wexler Foundation. You can oversee that. Put your name on it. I don't care."

"And the journal?"

"Goes to someone else."

His face went tight. "Who?"

"A student."

"Which student? From Mudwick? Someone I could contact, coordinate with—"

"No."

He left angry. I didn't have the energy to feel bad about it.

Sarah came on Thursday, like always. I was in bed by then. Hadn't been out of it in two days.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi yourself."

I pointed at the desk. "Drawer. There's a journal."

She hesitated. I watched her cross the room, open the drawer, lift the journal out. Her hands were shaking. She could feel what it was.

"This is..."

"Everything I know. Everything I am." I smiled. Smiling hurt but most things hurt now. "I want you to have it."

"I can't—"

"You can. You will." I took a breath. Several breaths. Breathing was getting harder. "Don't just read it. Write in it. Add your questions to mine. Keep wondering."

"I don't know if I'm good enough."

"You're not. Neither was I. Neither is anyone." I reached for her hand. Held it as tight as I could manage. "That's the point. We're all not good enough. We try anyway. We add what we can to what came before and hope someone better comes after."

Sarah was crying. I couldn't cry anymore. Didn't have the moisture to spare.

"I'll take care of it," she said.

"I know you will."

I died the next Tuesday. I don't remember much of those last days. Just Sarah reading to me from the journal, her voice going rough on the parts where I'd written about things that mattered.

What I do remember, right at the end, was feeling the saturation leave my body and go somewhere. Into the room. Into the garden. Into the journal Sarah was holding.

Contributing. One last time.

I hope she can feel me in there, whoever she becomes. I hope my questions keep her company on the nights when the answers won't come.

That's all any of us can leave behind. Not conclusions. Just better questions.