What you are worth was never earned

There is a bed in the downstairs room now, and it is not a temporary arrangement.

Start with what is true. A great deal has been taken from you. The knees went, and the hearing on one side, and the licence. The house with the step down into the kitchen. Names go now that never used to go. And the funerals, which came closer together after a while, and are not finished.

Your usefulness is a separate thing, and a good deal of that has gone too. It is a real loss and it belongs on the list above. It is not what this page is about.

That list is not one anybody should argue with, and nothing here is going to.

Now the thing this book holds, said once and plainly.

What a person is worth is not earned, and it cannot be forfeited.

That is a position and not a finding. It is not going to be proved to you here, and the reason is not that the proof is difficult. A thing that could be awarded could also be withdrawn. You have spent sixty years in rooms where people decided what you were worth, and you do not need another verdict, even a kind one, even this book's.

So it is not a compliment. Nobody is being singled out and nothing has been looked up about you. It holds on every day without exception, which is exactly why it cannot be evidence about any particular one — it was just as true on the worst day you can remember, and it was true while you were doing the thing.

And if you feel reduced — not think it, feel it, in the body, most days, on waking — that is not a fault in your reasoning for this page to correct. It is often an illness. It is treatable, and it goes to the doctor with the rest of it.

If what you are carrying is what somebody did to you, this comes to you first and in your own order.

A great deal was taken. Years of it. Sleep. Whatever you would have been if that door had opened differently. Nobody here is going to tell you what is and is not on that list. It is yours, you have counted it, and it is not one anybody should argue with either.

What this book says is narrower than any of that, and it is only this. What you are worth was not among the things he was able to reach. Not because he was not strong enough. Because it is not the sort of thing anybody awards or removes — not him, not the people who did not come, and not you on your own worst assessment of yourself at four in the morning.

Three things this does not mean. None of them is cancelled by the others and none is addressed to somebody else.

What a person is worth and what they did are two different measurements. Both are real. Holding the first settles nothing whatever about the second.

Conduct still has to be answered for. Harm may still need repairing and money may still need paying. That is not altered by anything on this page.

And it obliges nobody to have you back. Not your daughter, not your brother, not anybody. Seeing it in a person is not a reason to sit in a room with them.

And what you did is not reduced by any of it either. Not the one night. Not the forty years of evenings. Not the thing everybody in that house learned to listen for before they came in.

Which is why the condition on all of this is today and not tomorrow. If there is something that was yours, it gets named accurately, out loud, once, to somebody. If there is a call that could still be made or a thing that has never been said to a person who is still alive, it gets made today. Nothing on this page stands in for that, and none of it is an explanation to offer them.

A great deal has been taken. Not that.