A swarm of indecipherable legalese and not-so-subtle insinuations. The banks and collection agencies were demanding Henry take over Papa’s unfinished payments and settle his debts, threatening repossession, probate court showdowns, and garnisheeing his wages. They were relentless, seething, foaming. Their persistence would have made even the most shameless, derisive, and downright slimy of the skinnies blush. After a twenty-minute conversation with an estate lawyer (billed the full hourly rate of $150), all the logistics and ciphers got distilled down to more comprehensible terms:

As executor, Henry was legally obliged to set his neck to the chopping block.

It tuned out that, following Mom’s diagnosis, Papa had refinanced their mortgage into a home equity loan, the distinction of which Henry didn’t understand other than that it now permitted lenders to collect payments from him, the estate’s executor. Signing away his childhood home at a gouging loss was only the beginning. The lawyer had also explained that theirs was one of thirty states with something called a filial responsibility statute, which saddled Henry, the surviving adult child, with all of his parents’ unpaid medical bills. This figure was mountainous. Mom’s diagnosis had made Papa desperate, rash, and so no expense had been spared. Even after refinancing the mortgage, he’d signed off on tens of thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have nor could ever repay, for whatever cutting-edge, experimental treatments were suggested by one referred specialist to the next. And now, on top of Mom’s expenses—even though Papa had been pronounced dead on arrival—Henry owed another two grand for the ambulance that had transported Papa’s still-warm carcass from a job site to the hospital.

After an estate sale, all that remained in Henry’s possession were this check, the plain container, and his parents’ library. The life insurance payout the collectors couldn’t legally claim, the ashes and books they hadn’t wanted.

The sun had climbed higher, rinsing the grapefruit dawn into a cloudless cerulean. The coffee had gone lukewarm. He gulped back half the mug. Sighed. Having survived the initial blitz of postmortem duties that had distracted him from grieving, it only seemed right to dedicate this quiet, undisturbed morning to do just that. But when he wrenched his head space in the direction of nostalgia, fishing for memories and finally permitting himself to entertain all those hypothetical, never-to-be moments, he wasn’t overcome by the same vacuum of despair that had sucked all color from the year following Mom’s passing. Instead, what came was a pucker of guilt. Didn’t seem right. The discrepancy between the degree of loss and anguish he’d felt for Mom compared with Papa’s death now was so vast that his thoughts practically echoed inside him, like a penny down a well.

The problem was that Henry was happy.