Long before you took your last breath, you’d been preparing to die. “You know where the yellow folder is?” you’d ask every time I was home. “Yes, Papa,” I’d say. It was in your meticulously organized office, my old bedroom, in the cabinet next to your desk, on the third shelf. It was perfectly placed, between the red and blue folders. There was only one yellow one. “You know what song to play at my funeral?” he’d ask. “Yes, Papa. ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon,” I’d tell him — your life song, you’d call it. “How the world should be,” he’d always say.
Your presumed death always felt like some elusive date in the far away future, one we both knew would come, and one I feared would happen when I’d be too young to lose a father. No matter how many times you rehearsed the end of your life — all of your plans, all of your organizing — all of it blew up in your face two months before you died, when I sat across from you at your dining room table, the yellow folder between us, tearing up my insides.