I did not open it because I had been given the two facts I wanted — it was quick, it was not his fault — and I had worked out, without ever putting it into words, that everything else in that envelope could only make it worse.
So I made a decision, in the October of 2023, not to know anything more about the last twenty minutes of my son’s life.
And in those twenty minutes my son did the best thing he has ever done.
He got out of his own car with injuries that killed him ninety minutes later, and he went to the other one, and he got a three-year-old out of it, and he carried her up a verge, and he sat down beside her and talked to her until a man in a flatbed arrived.
That was in my bureau. In an envelope. For two years.
And I sat on that sofa every evening telling people that my son had a big heart, in the past tense, as a general statement about his character — with the evidence of the single largest thing he ever did eleven feet away, unopened, because I had decided I already knew as much as I wanted.
