You will not know their names until you are already in the room, and there will be more of them than you think. Seventeen things to leave at the nurses station, chosen to be shared out rather than handed over.
The retirement aisle is full of objects that commemorate the job she has just put down. What she has actually been handed is time. These seventeen are addressed to the hours.
Fifteen things chosen against the registry rather than from it, drawn from what parents say they reached for at three in the morning, and from the fortnight afterwards that nobody buys a gift for.
One gift for every year the tradition names, from paper at the first to silver at the twenty-fifth, including the two years the list gets wrong and the one material you are not legally allowed to buy.