My dad spent his working life as a consultant. He was good at it — good enough that nearly every client wrote him a glowing recommendation after each project, and he saved them. At some point he bound the 100+ letters into a book, made a second copy and gave it to me.
I never quite knew what to do with it. The letters were lovely, but they were glowing about the practical things — he brought the project in on time, he saved them tons of money, he was a joy to work with. Read end to end, the book described a reliable vendor. It did not describe the man who, when he ate in a hospital cafeteria, would end up at a table with whoever was nearby — a surgeon, a nun, the person mopping the floor — and somehow have them telling him their troubles by the end of lunch. It didn't describe what I saw when I went "to work" with him — people saying, "Oh hiiiiii Abe!" as if they'd found their long-lost teddy bear. It didn't describe the laugh that was always a half-second away. It didn't describe him deciding, at sixty-something and badly out of shape, to ride a hundred miles on a department-store bike just to be next to me for two days.
When he died, someone read from the binder at the service. Held it up, more or less, as the evidence. Here is what he was worth. Here is the proof.
A couple years later, I asked a friend to build a bonfire in her backyard so I could burn my copy.
I want to be careful about how that sounds, because it wasn't anger. It was closer to the opposite. The binder was how he'd understood his own worth — a ledger of usefulness, totaled and bound — and I think he half-believed it. I think he handed me the copy because it was the most solid proof he had that his life had counted for something. Here. In case you ever wonder whether I mattered. That's a heartbreaking thing to give your son. Not because it's nothing, but because it's so much less than what was true.
So I burned it. Not to erase him — to free him from it. The man was never the invoices. He was the cafeteria, the laugh, the bike. The binder was the costume he'd been wearing so long he'd mistaken it for his face, and I didn't want to keep the costume. I wanted to keep him.
I notice the same instinct in myself, and in nearly everyone I sit with. Different binders: a résumé, a follower count, a folder of testimonials we reread on bad days. But it’s the same quiet hope that a tall enough stack will settle the question. We assemble the evidence that we've been useful, on time, worth the money, and we mistake the accumulating proof for the thing it was supposed to be proof of. And then we hand it to the people we love, as if it were love.
The people who loved him didn’t need the binder. They’d had lunch with him.
He’s been gone a few years now, and while I don’t have the letters, I have a picture of him on that bike.