“It was a terrible choice he made,” the mother said.

“It was an awful disease,” I said and let it drop when I saw her face harden with disagreement.

“Well, thanks for everything you did for Frank,” Casey said. She motioned for me to sit next to her and I did. I tried not to look at Frank lying there next to us. There were a lot of flowers in the room, all with white envelopes attached. Casey noticed me looking at them.

“You should read the notes,” she said, “they’re all nice, nice tributes to Frank.”

I couldn’t look at them.

“He helped a lot of people,” Casey said.

“He hurt a few too,” her father said.

It’s the hurt that lasts.

—

Hundreds of people came to the visitation. Almost all of them told his parents and sister the same thing, how much Frank had helped them, what a good person he was, how much of a difference he’d made. All I could think is that they didn’t really know Frank. They knew part of him, a version of him, but not the complete person. Maybe that’s all I knew too. Maybe that’s all we can ever know about each other. Maybe I don’t even know what I’m talking about. But I know that the version they found of him was not the version I knew. He died with someone else’s name and someone else’s drugs. I certainly didn’t know that person. I was at a stranger’s wake.

Frank’s father acted as if he were at someone else’s service too. He casually picked at his fingernails, checked his watch, checked his phone. He was running out the clock. I tried not to judge. Everyone deals with grief in their own way. I remember how calm my father was at my mother’s funeral. He sat and shook hands and listened as everyone said something meaningless and sympathetic. My father nodded and thanked everyone for coming. His voice never wavered; he never cried. Everyone talked about how strong he was. “You’re a rock,” they told him. “Be strong for your son. He needs you to be strong.” Except he wasn’t strong. He was the weakest I’d ever seen him, too weak to cry, too weak to do anything at all except sit there and endure it. He had been emptied out to a brittle shell, and afterward, what filled him was bitter. It took him a long time to regain his strength, only to have it taken away again in the end. I told myself that I wouldn’t be like my father; I wouldn’t be weak. I had to have strength to figure out what happened to Frank. I had to have that or I would have nothing.