I felt totally unprepared for this. The truth was, I was 38 years old, but had never really lived. I had no passions—well, other than baseball, which can be a pretty solitary interest. I'd always been one of those invisible people. If I was a character in a movie, I'd be the first one eaten by the shark. I had worked at my current job for ten years and was good at my work. I handled the customers well and, as far as I could determine, my staff all liked me. I possessed a decent amount of common sense and problem-solving skills—a necessity of my job. But somehow, being confronted with this problem had left me feeling extremely inadequate.

Maybe it was time to search through my father's things and see if there was a clue to what this was about. I didn't even know if he had any of my grandfather's belongings. Where would I start?

I got to my father's house in record time and introduced myself to the officer, who escorted me through the rooms. I never ceased to be amazed at how sparse his home was. The image of college professors is one of clutter—piles of books and papers untouched for years—absent-minded scholars more interested in theory than real life. My father was the opposite. Not a thing out of place in the entire house. That often baffled me when I was younger, but he once told me that when he reached a certain stature in his job, he no longer brought work home with him, unless, of course, you count his grade-related trysts.

I could tell pretty quickly that nothing had been touched, so I thanked the officer for waiting around, and then called a friend from childhood who still lived in the area and was a carpenter. I could tell he wasn't happy about it, but he agreed to come over a bit later in the afternoon and fix the broken back door.

Now what? I wasn't overly close to my father, but I still felt his loss as I wandered through the house. Lack of closeness didn't mean lack of love. We had established our relationship and were comfortable with it.

I knew that I was going to have to clean out the house at some point and put it on the market, but I wasn't looking forward to it. It had nothing to do with sentiment. More like inertia. The house was paid for and selling it would bring me in a few hundred thousand dollars. With no siblings to share it with, I'd be in pretty good shape financially. I would offer to share it with my mother, but I knew she would turn me down. She wanted nothing to do with him even in death. Besides, shrewd investing of the alimony payments over the years had left her quite comfortable. I'd get to the cleaning out stage at some point.

In the meantime, I had a mission. I climbed the steps to the attic. As expected, it was immaculate. There were plenty of boxes, but each was clearly labeled, so I started my search. Clearly labeled or not, not one box had anything written on it that referred to my grandfather. My friend Steve showed up as I was finishing my search, and I set him to work on the back door. I went back up to the attic, took another quick look around and almost called it quits.