The Last Man At That Table

There were eleven of them and he was the youngest by nine years.

He can still put every one of them in their chair. He could draw it. The one who talked too much is on the left with his back to the window. The two brothers are together, because they were always together. The old man at the end who said about four words in three hours and every one of them landed.

He gave his word that evening, out loud, in front of all of them, about a thing that would have taken twenty minutes to explain to anybody who was not in the room.

He has kept it for thirty one years. Not perfectly, but he has kept it, and he has never complained about it to a living soul, and there were at least four years in the middle when keeping it cost him something he has never itemized.

The last of them went in February.

He was at the funeral. He carried. He said something at the tea afterwards that made people laugh in the right way.

And he drove home and sat in the car outside his own house for a long time, and what he understood, sitting there, has not left him since.

He is the last one who knows.

Not the last one who cares. His family care, and they are good people, and if he sat his son down tonight the boy would listen properly and would not fidget.

But he would be listening the way a man listens to something that happened before he was born. Interested. At a distance. Nodding.

There is nobody alive who was in the room.

Nobody who knows what he undertook, or why the room went quiet when he said it, or what those four years in the middle actually took out of him. It exists now in exactly one place, and that place is a sixty eight year old man who is starting to notice his own memory doing things it did not used to do.

If you are the last one who remembers something, come and sit at this end. There is far too much food and nobody is going to ask you to explain anything.

The psalm that puts everything in one sentence

There is a passage that says the whole of what you found out in that car, and then puts something beside it.

They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.Psalm 102:26-27

The first half is the thing nobody says at a funeral tea. They shall perish. All of them. Not tragically, not unusually, and not because anything went wrong. Like a garment wears out, which is what garments do.

And in the same breath, without a pause for comfort, the psalm names the one who does not.

Thou art the same.

Not thou shalt restore them. Not thou shalt make it feel better. Thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end, which means there is exactly one party in that room whose memory has not been affected by February.

You are standing in front of a witness whose years have no end. Psalm 102:27 puts God's sameness directly against everything wearing out like a garment, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept those two clauses in one sentence rather than separating the loss from the anchor, which means the room you gave your word in has one person still in it.

Eleven witnesses, and one who was there first

Now let us be precise about that evening, because precision is what gets a man out of a parked car.

Eleven men heard you. That is real and it mattered and it is why the room went quiet.

But a witness is somebody who confirms a thing was said. A witness is not what makes it binding, and a witness is not who it was said to.

You did not give your word to eleven men. You gave it in front of them.

You gave that word in the hearing of somebody who was in the room before any of the eleven arrived and did not leave in February. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and it is written of a record God keeps rather than one a generation keeps, and it is the same Spirit who moves a thing to be remembered, so the only copy of that evening is not the one in your head.

The memory that is starting to go

Here is the thing that has never been said out loud, and it is the real one, and it is worse than being lonely.

You have noticed your memory doing things. And you have worked out that when it goes, the thing goes with it, and thirty one years of keeping something will simply stop having ever happened.

You were never the archive, and nothing you have kept depends on your recall of it. Psalm 139:16 says in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them, and it is written of a record made before the man existed rather than assembled by him, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the deep things, which means the evening is written down somewhere your own memory has no authority over.

Whatever your memory does in the years ahead, the file does not go with it.