Does It Matter

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He had begun thinking about it in the mornings.

Not every morning. Mostly the quiet ones, when the coffee was hot, and the sunlight came through the kitchen window at an angle that showed the dust floating in the room. He would sit at the table and listen to the house settling around him. There were photographs on the refrigerator, a scratch on the floor where an old dog used to turn circles before lying down, and a small dent in the wall from a Christmas tree carried through the doorway badly many years ago. He had spent most of his life believing that important things announced themselves. Promotions. Weddings. Funerals. Birthdays ending in zero. But now he wondered if a life was measured differently. Perhaps it was measured by sandwiches made for children who were hungry, doors held open for strangers, lawns cut for neighbors who were sick, and phone calls made when there was nothing particular to say except, I was thinking about you.

He had known love and he had known loss, and somewhere along the way he had discovered they were not opposites. They were companions. You could lose someone and still love them. You could find someone new and discover that the heart did not have to throw anything away to make room. He thought about people whose names he could still hear spoken in voices long gone. Teachers. Friends. His mother calling him home before dark. People who had probably gone to their graves wondering the same thing he wondered now. I hope I mattered. And he wished he could tell them that they had. The woman who taught him to read mattered every time he opened a book. The man who once gave him a second chance mattered every time he offered one to somebody else. The people he had loved mattered because some small part of them had become part of him, carried forward without ceremony, like a flame passed from one candle to another.

That evening he stepped outside and watched the last light settle into the trees. Somewhere a bird made one final call before night. A car passed on the road. Someone laughed two houses away. The world continued without asking whether he understood it. He stood there for a while and finally realized that perhaps no one gets to know the answer to the question. Maybe that is part of being alive. We plant things whose shade we may never sit beneath. We say kind words without knowing which ones will be remembered. We love people without knowing how long we will have them. Then one day we leave behind a scratched floor, an old photograph, a story somebody still tells, and a few people who occasionally stop in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and think of us.

He looked toward the darkening sky. “I hope I mattered,” he said. And somewhere behind him, through the open kitchen window, he heard someone call his name. He smiled. For tonight, that was answer enough.

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