Part 2: My 88-Year-Old Father Reads the Evening Paper Out Loud to His Golden Retriever Every Single Night Since My Mother Died — When I Finally Asked Him Why, He Said Eight Words I Have Not Stopped Thinking About

The Golden Retriever’s name is Bramble.

She is nine years old. Sixty-two pounds. A dark golden coat with copper highlights that come out in summer light. White circling her muzzle and the tops of her paws. Soft floppy ears. Eyes the color of root beer. A small star-shaped patch of white on her chest. The careful, watchful manner of an old Golden who has been somebody’s quiet shadow for a long time.

My parents adopted Bramble in 2017 from a small Golden Retriever rescue in Lafayette. She was eighteen months old at the time. The rescue had pulled her from a backyard breeder operation that was being shut down. She had been in a wire crate her entire life until that point. The rescue had been concerned, when my parents applied, that Bramble might not adjust to a quiet retired-couple home — she had been so understimulated that she was withdrawn even with kind handlers.

My parents took her home that Saturday afternoon. My mother knelt down on the kitchen floor of their Craftsman with her milky-white eyes and her uneven balance and put both hands on Bramble’s face.

She said, “Bramble. Honey. I cannot see you very well. But I am going to love you the rest of my life.”

Bramble pressed her copper-colored head against my mother’s chest.

She had been on the foot of my parents’ bed every night since.

For seven years, my father had read the newspaper out loud at the kitchen table while my mother sat across from him with her cup of decaf and Bramble lay on the kitchen tile by my mother’s feet.

Bramble was used to the sound of my father reading. She had heard the front page, the obituaries, the editorials, the high school sports, the weather, every single evening for seven years.

She had heard the entire newspaper, on the evening of March 13th, 2024, with my mother sitting across from my father at the kitchen table for the last time.

The funeral was on Tuesday March 19th, 2024 at the small Lutheran church my parents had attended for fifty-six years.

My father did not cry at the funeral. He shook hands. He said thank you. He let elderly women he had known since 1968 hug him for too long. He stood at the receiving line for an hour and forty minutes. He greeted everyone.

He came home that night with me. I stayed at the house for three nights after the funeral. I did the dishes. I answered the casseroles. I returned phone calls.

On Tuesday evening — the night of the funeral — my father sat down in his wing-back chair in the living room at 6:30 p.m.

The wing-back chair was the chair he sat in to read to my mother. My mother sat in the matching wing-back across from him. The two chairs faced each other across a small braided rug with a side table between them. The side table had two coasters, a small lamp, my father’s reading glasses, and the day’s newspaper.

The newspaper was the Coopersville Daily Herald. The local paper. Twelve pages on a weekday. My father had been a subscriber since 1971.

That Tuesday evening, the Herald was sitting folded on the side table. It had been delivered that morning, before the funeral. Nobody had read it.

My father sat in his wing-back chair.

I sat on the couch across the room.

He picked up the newspaper.

He unfolded it.

He put on his reading glasses.

He looked at the empty wing-back chair across from him.

He looked at Bramble, who had walked into the living room behind him and lain down on the rug between the two chairs in the spot where she always lay when my father read at the kitchen table.

He cleared his throat.

He started to read.

He read the headline. He read the lead paragraph. He read the second paragraph. His voice broke in the middle of the third paragraph. He pressed his hand against his mouth for a few seconds. He took a slow breath. He kept reading.

He read me — and Bramble — the entire front page of the Coopersville Daily Herald that night.

He read the local section. He read the weather. He read the obituaries. He read his own wife’s obituary, which was on page four, which he had helped me write the previous Friday. He read it without his voice breaking.

He read the editorial page. He read the high school sports.

He read the entire paper.

When he was finished he folded it carefully along the original creases. He set it down on the side table.

He took off his reading glasses.

He said, “There you go, ladies. That’s tonight.”

I sat on the couch and tried not to make a sound.

Bramble thumped her tail twice on the rug.

He stood up. He went to bed.

I did not understand, that night, what I had just watched.

I thought he was working through grief. I thought it was a one-time thing. The night of the funeral. The first night without her. I thought he had needed to do something familiar.

I thought he would not do it again.

I drove back to Indianapolis on Friday morning. I told my husband Doug, when I got home, what my father had done.

Doug said, “Honey. Are you sure he was reading to the dog and not just reading out loud?”

I said, “He was reading to the dog.”

Doug said, “Did he know you were there?”

I said, “Yes.”

Doug said, “Greta. Honey. He was reading to the dog because he had to read to somebody.”

I said, “I think he just couldn’t stop.”

I did not yet know how right Doug was.

I drove up to Coopersville the next Saturday — eleven days after the funeral.

I let myself in with my key at 4:30 p.m.

My father was in the kitchen making himself a sandwich. He looked up. He smiled. He said, “Sweetheart. You didn’t tell me you were coming.”

I said, “I didn’t decide until this morning.”

He said, “Stay for dinner.”

I stayed for dinner. We had grilled cheese and tomato soup. We talked about the church ladies who had been bringing him food. We talked about the cardinal that had been coming to my mother’s bird feeder. We talked about my mother, gently, briefly, the way you talk about her when you have to.

At 6:25 p.m., my father stood up from the kitchen table.

He went to the front door. He opened the front door. The newspaper carrier had left the Coopersville Daily Herald on the porch. He picked it up.

He walked into the living room. He sat down in his wing-back chair. He put on his reading glasses.

Bramble walked into the living room and lay down on the braided rug between the two chairs.

My father looked across at the empty wing-back chair where my mother had sat for thirty-four years.

He cleared his throat.

He started to read.

He read the headline. He read the lead paragraph. He kept reading.

He read me — but mostly he read Bramble — the entire Coopersville Daily Herald of Saturday March 30th, 2024.

He had, in the eleven days since the funeral, done this every single night.

He told me later that he had never missed an evening.

He has, by the date I am writing this, not missed a single evening for fourteen months.

I asked him about it that Saturday night, after he finished reading. I had not known how to ask before.

He folded the paper. He set it down on the side table. He took off his reading glasses.

I said, “Dad.”

He said, “Sweetheart.”

I said, “Dad. Why are you doing this?”

He looked at me.

He said, “Honey. I read to your mother for thirty-four years. Every single evening. I didn’t read to her because she liked the news. I read to her because she could not see, and somebody had to.”

He said, “When she died, the paper kept coming.”

He said, “I picked it up the night of the funeral because I had been picking it up for thirty-four years.”

He said, “I sat down in this chair because I had been sitting in this chair for thirty-four years.”

He said, “I started reading because if I had not started reading I would have been sitting alone in a quiet house.”

He said, “And the quiet, Greta — the quiet was the part I could not handle.”

He said, “Bramble was lying right there on the rug.”

He said, “She had heard the paper for seven years.”

He said, “She knew the routine.”

He said, “I read the paper to her that night because there was somebody to read it to.”

He said, “I read the paper to her every night since because the alternative is the silence.”

He paused.

He said, “Greta. I have been married to your mother for sixty-one years. I have not lived in a quiet house in sixty-one years. I do not know how to live in a quiet house. I do not want to learn.”

He looked down at Bramble on the rug.

He said, “She lets me do my job.”

He said, “She lets me keep doing my job.”

He said, “I have a job to do at six-thirty every evening, sweetheart. The paper comes. Somebody in this house cannot read it. I read it out loud. That is my job. It has been my job for thirty-four years. I am not stopping.”

He looked up at me.

He said the eight words I have not been able to stop thinking about.

He said, “Silence is what I am afraid of, kiddo.”

I drove home to Indianapolis that Sunday afternoon.

I told Doug that night what my father had said.

Doug listened to all of it.

He said, “Honey. Your dad isn’t reading to the dog. He’s not reading to your mom. He’s reading to keep the house from being quiet.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “He’s reading to keep her in the room with him.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “He’s reading to keep himself in the room with him.”

I sat on our couch and could not say anything.

Doug said, “Greta. He found a way to not stop being a husband. Bramble made it possible. Bramble lets him be the man he was.”

I said, “Doug. I want her to live forever. She’s nine. Goldens don’t live that much longer.”

Doug said, “Honey. Then we make sure she has a really good few years.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “And when she goes — and we need to think about this — your dad is going to need another dog to keep reading to. Or he’s going to stop reading. And if he stops reading, he is going to stop.”

I sat on our couch in our quiet living room and thought about my father in his quiet living room without my mother and without Bramble and without the Coopersville Daily Herald, and I understood what Doug was telling me.

The newspaper, my father had said, was his job.

The job was the thing that was keeping him.

The dog was what made the job still possible.

It has been fourteen months since the funeral.

My father is eighty-eight now. His left hip is worse. His memory is fine. His eyes are fine. His heart is, the cardiologist says, the heart of a man twenty years younger.

He reads the Coopersville Daily Herald out loud to Bramble every single evening at 6:30 p.m.

He has not missed a night.

He has read the paper to her on the evening after his prostate biopsy in May. He has read the paper to her on the evening after his oldest friend Harlan died in August. He has read the paper to her on the evening of his wedding anniversary in June — he read the wedding announcements, my mother’s favorite section, and his voice broke twice but he finished. He has read the paper to her on Christmas Eve.

I have been gradually, with my father’s reluctant approval, training myself to read the paper to him on my visits — so that the role can be handed back to him in some form, so that he is also being read to. He pretends he does not like it. He likes it.

I have also, in the last six months, started looking quietly at Golden Retriever rescues in central Indiana. Not to replace Bramble. She is asleep on the foot of his bed right now as I am writing this. She is going to be there for a while. I hope so.

But because Doug was right.

When she goes, my father is going to need another dog to read to.

I have already picked her out, in case. A two-year-old Golden named June at a rescue in Bloomington. I have been emailing the rescue every other month. They are holding her, in a quiet way, for the day my father is ready.

I have not told my father.

I will not tell him until the day I bring her home.

He will read her the Coopersville Daily Herald on the evening of that day.

I know, because that is who he is.

I drove up to Coopersville last weekend.

I sat on my parents’ couch in the living room at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday evening.

My father picked up the Coopersville Daily Herald off the side table.

He put on his reading glasses.

He looked across at the empty wing-back chair.

He looked down at Bramble, who was already on the braided rug.

He cleared his throat.

He started to read.

I sat on the couch and listened to my eighty-eight-year-old father read the front page of a small Indiana newspaper out loud to a nine-year-old Golden Retriever and to me and to the empty chair where my mother sat for thirty-four years.

He read for forty-one minutes.

He folded the paper.

He set it down.

He took off his reading glasses.

He said, “There you go, ladies. That’s tonight.”

Bramble thumped her tail twice on the rug.

He looked across the room at me.

I was crying.

He said, “Sweetheart. Don’t cry.”

I said, “Daddy.”

He said, “I’m not alone, kiddo. I’m doing my job.”

He looked down at Bramble.

He said, “She listens. She listens every single night. She has heard every paper for fourteen months. She knows my voice.”

He paused.

He said, “Your mother heard my voice every evening for sixty-one years.”

He said, “I’m not gonna take it back yet, Greta.”

He said, “Not while I have somebody to read it to.”

Bramble’s tail thumped the rug.

The lamp on the side table was on.

The room was warm.

It was, in every way that mattered, not silent.

If you want to read the rest of what happened — the night of the funeral when my father sat down in his wing-back chair for the first time, the conversation we had on a Saturday evening eleven days later when I finally asked him why, the eight words he answered me with, and what my husband Doug helped me understand about why my father is going to need another dog one day soon — I’ve shared the full story in the first comment below.