I have been thinking about that a lot.

The second star was for the parking.

I want to be fair. Sandra — her name was Sandra, and she had the kind of steady hands you want in a person who is telling you the worst thing you will ever hear — Sandra was professional. She was kind. She smelled like lavender and competence. She sat across from me at Dad's kitchen table, the one he built in 1987 from a kit he got at Sears, and she folded her hands and said, "Mr. Law, your father has maybe a week."

I wrote it on my calendar. You do things like that. You write it down because your brain stops working right and you need the calendar to do some of the believing for you.

Then Dad went ahead and lived sixteen days.

Now before you say anything, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say what my sister Patrice said, which was, "John, that is the most — " and then she used a word I won't put here, followed by "thing you have ever done, and you once drove four hours to return a mattress." The mattress thing was a principle. This is also a principle.

The principle is: words mean things.

I had people coming in from Tulsa on day eight. My cousin Harold, who had not seen Dad since the Clinton administration and who apparently required seventy-two hours notice to book a flight despite the fact that we live in an era of miracles and smartphones, could not rearrange to come later. He sent a card. The card said "Thinking of You" and had a lighthouse on it, which I thought was a strange choice, but Harold is a strange man.

My daughter drove eleven hours. She made it on day six. She sat with him, which I'm glad for. But she had to leave on day nine, and she missed the end, which I know she carries, and which I carry too, and which is Sandra's fault, professionally speaking.

I am not a monster. I gave her two stars. You give one star when someone spits in your food. Sandra did not spit in anything. She held Dad's hand and explained to him, patient as sunrise, what was going to happen to his body, and he nodded along like she was describing a bus route he'd be taking without us. She came back twice more, both times bringing a kind of calm into that house that I do not have the math to calculate the value of.

But the estimate was off by more than a week, which in project management is called a significant variance, and I have sat through enough corporate trainings to know you cannot just let a significant variance go undocumented.

The review has sixteen words: "Compassionate and skilled. Parking situation needs work. Prediction was off by more than a week. Two stars."

Patrice says it makes me look like a person who has never experienced an emotion. I told her that is not true, I am experiencing several emotions, and what I am also experiencing is a responsibility to the integrity of the consumer review ecosystem, which, if we all start lying in it, helps nobody.

Dad would have left her five stars. He always over-tipped. He believed in being generous with people who showed up, regardless of outcome.

I have been thinking about that a lot.

The two star review is still up.