The Weight You Can Put DownChapter 9 of 225 min
The ones that are not for the floor
The number is in the back of the address book.
You have not needed to look it up for a long time.
Most of this book is about setting things down.
This chapter is the exception, because a few of the things you are carrying are not for the floor and never were. They are the ones with somebody still alive at the other end.
A call that could be made this week. A sentence that has never been said to a person who could still hear it. A thing somebody in the family has never been told and would want to know.
And one where the answer is not to ring. If they have asked for no contact, that is an answer and it was already given; ringing is not courage, it is overruling them.
Some of these should not be made at all. That is a real outcome of thinking about it honestly, and it is not failure.
Before any of that, the size of it.
It has been heavy for you for a long time. That is a fact about you, and it is not evidence about them.
Some of what you are carrying may not be in their head at all. Not since it happened, or never, or it went the way most things go, which is nowhere. You cannot know which, and this book will not guess for you.
A call that needs to be received does not take the thing off you. It hands it to them. They have to reconstruct it, work out what it meant, and then manage you about it, in an evening they had other plans for.
So the question is not how big it was. It is what the call asks of them.
A call that wants nothing back costs them very little, whatever it is about. Somebody ringing after thirty years to say a thing they never said, and leaving it at that, is not a strange call to get — it is five odd pleasant minutes and then the evening goes on. You can ring about a small thing. Ring about a small thing and want nothing from it, and nothing gets dug up.
What costs them is being needed to answer. To take it, to say it is all right, to produce the thing you have been waiting thirty years for. That is a job, and it is the same job whether the thing is enormous or small enough that they will have to be told what you mean.
Some things are owed and the cost is not the point: a fact they have been missing, a thing they were blamed for that was not theirs, something they asked for once and never got. Those go whatever it costs you.
And a letter is a version of this. It can be read when they are ready, or not opened, or thrown away in the hall without anybody having to stand there while it happens. Asking somebody who knows you both, first, is another. The telephone is not the only shape it comes in. It is the one that costs them the most, because it arrives in their evening whether or not they wanted it.
Before any of it: they are entitled to want nothing to do with it, to say so, and to put the phone down.
That is not a risk to be weighed. It is the position they have had all along, and it is as true before you dial as after.
The obstacle was never the words.
You know what you would say. You have known for years. The obstacle is that you do not know what comes back — that they might not take it, or might say something you would have to hear, or might be perfectly pleasant and nothing change.
So here is the one distinction this chapter has in it.
Saying it and it being received are two acts, and only one of them is yours.
They have been welded together in your head for so long that they feel like a single thing with a single outcome, and that single thing is impossible, which is why it has not happened. It is not one thing. It is a short one that requires nobody's agreement, standing next to a long one that was never available to you, or to anybody, at any point.
The first one is four minutes.
Nothing here asks you to stop wanting the second one. You are allowed to want an answer, badly, for as long as you like. Nobody is asking you to ring in a spirit of detachment or to pretend you do not mind how it goes. Wanting it is not a flaw in the act.
But two things about the saying.
It is an apology, not an explanation. Not why you were like that. Not what was going on for you at the time, not your father, not the hours you were working. All of it may be perfectly true and none of it belongs in that call. The moment it goes in, the call has become about your relief, and they will hear that immediately, because they have heard it before. What goes in is what you did, that it was yours, and that you are sorry. Then you stop talking.
And it is not owed a response.
Where it needs somebody else first.
If what needs saying touches money, or a will, or a house, that is a solicitor before it is a phone call.
If you cannot do it alone, somebody can sit in the room while you make the call. That is allowed.
If anybody is still being hurt, that goes today, and no part of this chapter says otherwise.
If there is nobody at the other end at all — if the person this belongs to is dead, or gone, or was never findable — that is chapter 11, The ones that cannot be settled, which does not pretend it can be fixed and says what is left when it cannot.
There is no version of this where you know first how it goes.