I stepped into the hallway and called my mother. I told her what I had found. She admitted she had wondered the same thing. She remembered Dad seeming far away during his final weeks and had been afraid to say it because it felt like criticizing a dying man. I told her I had felt guilty for being hurt by his silence. She said she had too. Maybe Dad had not been ignoring us. Maybe he had simply been struggling to hear and was too tired to ask for help.

We talked on that bench. We remembered things we had mistaken for distance: the way he nodded instead of answering, asked us to repeat ourselves, or smiled without joining conversations. The battery might have been dead. He might have been exhausted. He might have understood everything and lacked strength to respond. But the battery gave us a gentler possibility. I had been carrying resentment alongside sadness. I could not apologize to him, so I apologized to his memory.

Before we hung up, she asked what I would do with the battery. I told her I did not know. At home, I put Dad’s suit back in his closet and slipped the battery into the same pocket. It felt perfectly like him: prepared for a problem nobody else had noticed. He had always believed things mattered. A spare key. An umbrella. A note beside the coffee maker. An extra hearing aid battery.