* Marion is taking the day off. This column has been slightly edited since it first appeared in 2006.

This column contains a warning, although I don’t know exactly what my advice to you should be. Maybe I just need to recount what happened five days after my dad’s death, and if I omit some details, you’ll understand why.

My dad, 89, died on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, in his apartment in Manhattan. My brother was with him at the moment of his peaceful death, and I arrived the next morning on a red-eye from Sacramento.

By Saturday, my brother and I had made our decisions about funeral arrangements and dismantling the apartment — we postponed the second task — and my brother flew home while I waited a couple more days to pick up some items from the funeral home.

This meant that I stayed in my dad’s apartment alone. The first day I ran away from the place and spent the day with other people, but on the second day I was eager to do something that would bring me closer to my dad. I considered paging through his photograph albums, but I had done that recently, so I turned to his two-drawer file cabinet.

It creaked as I tugged on the drawer.

A meticulous record-keeper, my dad had filled the cabinet with 15 years of stock statements, insurance documents, medical information, and other paperwork, filed alphabetically in dog-eared folders. It was pretty boring stuff. Dad wasn’t one to save a lot of personal memorabilia.

Nevertheless, under the “F’s” I found a folder labeled “Frances.” I pulled it out and opened it.

Frances was my step-mother, the woman my father reached out to from his anguished loneliness after my mother died in 1987. He waited only slightly longer than a year before he married her, when he was 73 and she was 65.

The marriage lasted 16 years until Jan. 14, 2005, when Frances died on their anniversary.

The “Frances” folder, I soon discovered, contained an intimate record of their courtship and marriage.

My father had typed letters to Frances while they were dating and saved onion-skin copies for himself. She answered, and he saved her letters. They wrote about themselves, the things they’d done together, and what they might do in the future, where they might travel, where they might live.

After they married, my dad saved the birthday and Valentine’s Day cards Frances gave to him, all pink and loving, as well as copies of letters they wrote to each other in moments when they were too angry to speak.

He also saved a list, 75 items long, of instructions Frances gave him for how he should behave in public, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. Some of the instructions were so detailed that they sounded like instructions to a child — not a very bright one — even though my dad didn’t yet have dementia when they were written.

Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop, even though I felt as if someone were dicing me with a knife.

That my dad fell passionately in love with Frances, I knew. That the marriage grew troubled, I knew. But it was a surprise to discover that my dad only mentioned me once in the letters and my brother never.

He never wrote about my children — his only grandchildren — either.

This is not the sort of discovery a daughter wants to make, the discovery of her own unimportance, especially when she is alone in her dad’s apartment following his death.

Except that, if I’m honest, I have to say that part of me did want the information, because it explained some things. My dad was a needier person than he let on. Frances was his lifeline; I was the daughter who had moved away to start her own family.

So if the reading was helpful to me in some way, what’s the warning I want to give?

Well, I have a file cabinet, too. In it I save many of the same things my father did, financial records, receipts, warranties, health information. But my personal souvenirs greatly outnumber his. Now I’m wondering how things I’ve saved might look to the people who will find them someday.

How will my youthful correspondence with boyfriends sound, to my husband or anyone else? Did I save as many mementos from one child as from the other? Will my moments of heartache be too clear, my moments of happiness insufficiently documented?

In a society where we hate to think about death, few people think about the time after death when, like it or not, someone else will look at their belongings.

My warning is simple. Think about what they will find.
— Marion Franck lives in Davis with her family. Reach her at [email protected]

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